A comparative study on network motif discovery algorithms.

Subgraphs that occur in complex networks with significantly higher frequency than those in randomised networks are called network motifs. Such subgraphs often play important roles in the functioning of those networks. Finding network motifs is a computationally challenging problem. The main difficulties arise from the fact that real networks are large and the size of the search space grows exponentially with increasing network and motif size. Numerous methods have been developed to overcome these challenges. This paper provides a comparative study of the key network motif discovery algorithms in the literature and presents their algorithmic details on an example network.