Combining Motifs and Small-World Properties to Explore Complex Networks in Local and Global Views

摘要

To add to the current knowledge of structural organizing principles and evolutionary mechanisms, the authors propose a detection method for a) locating functionally and statistically significant network motifs and b) simultaneously detecting global statistical features and local connection structures in complex networks. Our results indicate that food webs are balanced due to their combinations of bridge and brick motifs, but electronic circuits and social networks are unbalanced because they consist of brick motifs only. We conclude that bridge and brick motif content analyses can assist researchers in understanding the small-world and clustering properties of network structures and for investigating network functions and behaviors.