Double Bounded Rough Set, Tension Measure, and Social Link Prediction

This paper describes a new approach of viewing a social relation as a string with various forces acting on it. Accordingly, a tension measure for a relation is defined. Various component forces of the tension measure are identified based on the structural information of the network. A new variant of rough set, namely, double bounded rough set, is developed in order to define these forces mathematically. It is revealed experimentally with synthetic and real-world data that positive and negative tension characterizes, relatively, the presence and absence of a physical link between two nodes. An algorithm based on tension measure is proposed for link prediction. Superiority of the algorithm is demonstrated on nine real-world networks, which include four temporal networks. The source code for calculating tension measure and link prediction algorithm is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/suman5/social-tension-measure.