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Motifs in Temporal Networks

Authors:

Ashwin Paranjape,

Austin R. Benson,

Jure LeskovecAuthors Info & Claims

WSDM '17: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

Pages 601 - 610

https://doi.org/10.1145/3018661.3018731

Published: 02 February 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Networks are a fundamental tool for modeling complex systems in a variety of domains including social and communication networks as well as biology and neuroscience. The counts of small subgraph patterns in networks, called network motifs, are crucial to understanding the structure and function of these systems. However, the role of network motifs for temporal networks, which contain many timestamped links between nodes, is not well understood.

Here we develop a notion of a temporal network motif as an elementary unit of temporal networks and provide a general methodology for counting such motifs. We define temporal network motifs as induced subgraphs on sequences of edges, design several fast algorithms for counting temporal network motifs, and prove their runtime complexity. We also show that our fast algorithms achieve 1.3x to 56.5x speedups compared to a baseline method.

We use our algorithms to count temporal network motifs in a variety of real-world datasets. Results show that networks from different domains have significantly different motif frequencies, whereas networks from the same domain tend to have similar motif frequencies. We also find that measuring motif counts at various time scales reveals different behavior.

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Cited By

Zhan XLiu CWang ZWang HHolme PZhang Z(2025)Measuring and utilizing temporal network dissimilarityCommunications Physics10.1038/s42005-025-01940-68:1Online publication date: 25-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-025-01940-6
Pu JWang YLi YZhou X(2025)Fast Approximate Temporal Butterfly Counting on Bipartite Graphs via Edge SamplingDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2024 International Workshops10.1007/978-981-96-0914-7_4(42-57)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0914-7_4
Tariq HHassani M(2025)Topology-Agnostic Detection of Temporal Money Laundering Flows in Billion-Scale TransactionsMachine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases10.1007/978-3-031-74643-7_29(402-419)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74643-7_29
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Motifs in Temporal Networks
1. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications
    1. Data mining
  2. World Wide Web
    1. Web mining
2. Theory of computation
  1. Design and analysis of algorithms
    1. Graph algorithms analysis

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cover image ACM Conferences

WSDM '17: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

February 2017

868 pages

ISBN:9781450346757

DOI:10.1145/3018661

General Chairs:
Maarten de Rijke
University of Amsterdam
,
Milad Shokouhi
Microsoft
,
Program Chairs:
Andrew Tomkins
Google
,
Min Zhang
Tsinghua University

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 February 2017

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Funding Sources

National Institutes of Health
National Science Foundation
Stanford Data Science Initiative
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

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WSDM 2017

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WSDM 2017: Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

February 6 - 10, 2017

Cambridge, United Kingdom

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WSDM '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 80 of 505 submissions, 16%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 498 of 2,863 submissions, 17%

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Citations

Cited By

Zhan XLiu CWang ZWang HHolme PZhang Z(2025)Measuring and utilizing temporal network dissimilarityCommunications Physics10.1038/s42005-025-01940-68:1Online publication date: 25-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-025-01940-6
Pu JWang YLi YZhou X(2025)Fast Approximate Temporal Butterfly Counting on Bipartite Graphs via Edge SamplingDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2024 International Workshops10.1007/978-981-96-0914-7_4(42-57)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0914-7_4
Tariq HHassani M(2025)Topology-Agnostic Detection of Temporal Money Laundering Flows in Billion-Scale TransactionsMachine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases10.1007/978-3-031-74643-7_29(402-419)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74643-7_29
McCauley SMoseley BNiaparast ASingh SSalakhutdinov RKolter ZHeller KWeller AOliver NScarlett JBerkenkamp F(2024)Incremental topological ordering and cycle detection with predictionsProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning10.5555/3692070.3693503(35240-35254)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3692070.3693503
Grigoriev AMironov SSidorov S(2024)Dynamics of Friendship Index in Complex NetworksModelling10.3390/modelling50300635:3(1219-1238)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/modelling5030063
Yang SZhu WZhang KDiao YBai Y(2024)Influence Maximization in Temporal Social Networks with the Mixed K-Shell MethodElectronics10.3390/electronics1313253313:13(2533)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13132533
Arregui-García BLonga ALotito QMeloni SCencetti G(2024)Patterns in Temporal Networks with Higher-Order Egocentric StructuresEntropy10.3390/e2603025626:3(256)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/e26030256
Zhu YGuo JLi HLiu SLi Y(2024)TSAGNN: Temporal link predict method based on two stream adaptive graph neural networkIntelligent Data Analysis10.3233/IDA-23736728:1(77-97)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.3233/IDA-237367
Steer BArnold NBa CLambiotte RYousaf HJeub LMurariu FKapoor SRico PChan RChan LAlford JClegg RCuadrado FBarnes MZhong PPougué-Biyong JAlnaimi A(2024)Raphtory: The temporal graph engine for Rust and PythonJournal of Open Source Software10.21105/joss.059409:95(5940)Online publication date: Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05940
Guliyev RHaldar AFerhatosmanoglu H(2024)D3-GNN: Dynamic Distributed Dataflow for Streaming Graph Neural NetworksProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3681954.368196117:11(2764-2777)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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