Abstract
The 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 characterize, 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 My GitLab.
