The mining of graphs in terms of their local substructure is a well-established methodology to analyze networks. It was hypothesized that motifs - subgraph patterns which appear significantly more often than expected at random - play a key role for t
he ability of a system to perform its task. Yet the framework commonly used for motif-detection averages over the local environments of all nodes. Therefore, it remains unclear whether motifs are overrepresented in the whole system or only in certain regions. In this contribution, we overcome this limitation by mining node-specific triad patterns. For every vertex, the abundance of each triad pattern is considered only in triads it participates in. We investigate systems of various fields and find that motifs are distributed highly heterogeneously. In particular we focus on the feed-forward loop motif which has been alleged to play a key role in biological networks.
Conventionally, pairwise relationships between nodes are considered to be the fundamental building blocks of complex networks. However, over the last decade the overabundance of certain sub-network patterns, so called motifs, has attracted high atten
tion. It has been hypothesized, these motifs, instead of links, serve as the building blocks of network structures. Although the relation between a networks topology and the general properties of the system, such as its function, its robustness against perturbations, or its efficiency in spreading information is the central theme of network science, there is still a lack of sound generative models needed for testing the functional role of subgraph motifs. Our work aims to overcome this limitation. We employ the framework of exponential random graphs (ERGMs) to define novel models based on triadic substructures. The fact that only a small portion of triads can actually be set independently poses a challenge for the formulation of such models. To overcome this obstacle we use Steiner Triple Systems (STS). These are partitions of sets of nodes into pair-disjoint triads, which thus can be specified independently. Combining the concepts of ERGMs and STS, we suggest novel generative models capable of generating ensembles of networks with non-trivial triadic Z-score profiles. Further, we discover inevitable correlations between the abundance of triad patterns, which occur solely for statistical reasons and need to be taken into account when discussing the functional implications of motif statistics. Moreover, we calculate the degree distributions of our triadic random graphs analytically.
