Motifs for processes on networks

Understand

The study of motifs in networks can help researchers uncover links between the structure and function of networks in biology, sociology, economics, and many other areas.

• Empirical studies of networks have identified feedback loops, feedforward loops, and several other small structures as "motifs" that occur frequently in real-world networks and may contribute by various mechanisms to important functions in these systems.
• However, these mechanisms are unknown for many of these motifs.
• We propose to distinguish between "structure motifs" (i.e., graphlets) in networks and "process motifs" (which we define as structured sets of walks) on networks and consider process motifs as building blocks of processes on networks.