Characterising inter and intra-community interactions in link streams using temporal motifs

Abstract

The analysis of dynamic networks has received a lot of attention in recent years, thanks to the greater availability of suitable datasets. One way to analyse such dataset is to study temporal motifs in link streams, i.e. sequences of links for which we can assume causality. In this article, we study the relationship between temporal motifs and communities, another important topic of complex networks. Through experiments on several real-world networks, with synthetic and ground truth community partitions, we identify motifs that are overrepresented at the frontier—or inside of—communities.