Network Motifs: A Survey

Abstract

Network motifs are the building blocks of complex networks. Studying these frequently occurring patterns disclose a lot of information about these networks. The applications of Network motifs are very much evident now-a-days, in almost every field including biological networks, World Wide Web (WWW), etc. Some of the important motifs are feed forward loops, bi-fan, bi-parallel, fully connected triads. But, discovering these motifs is a computationally challenging task. In this paper, various techniques that are used to discover motifs are presented, along with detailed discussions on several issues and challenges in this area.