
Chapter 9
Network Motif Discovery
9.1 Introduction
A network motif of a graph G is a subgraph of G that appears significantly more
than expected in G. Formally, network motif is a subgraph that exists with a much
higher frequency in G than expected in a similar random graph to G. A motif of
size k is called a k-motif. Milo et. al. were first to discover these over-represented
subgraphs in the networks they studied and proposed the network motifs as the basic
building blocks of complex networks [20]. Several motifs have been shown to have
functional significance in biological networks such as the PPI networks [3] and the
gene regulating networks [22] so