
Chapter 6
Special Subgraphs
6.1 Introduction
Discovering subgraph structures in a complex network may provide us with impor-
tant information about the functionality of the network. We have briefly discussed in
Chapter 4 that if these structures are frequent in the network, they are called network
motifs and may indicate fundamental structures with basic functions in that network.
Our aim in this chapter is to discover and construct subgraphs in a complex net-
work that may be attributed to some special function about the structure of that net-
work. We have already described some of these structures in relation to the com-
plexity of the algorithms;