Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 16: Poster - Glasses / Stat. Phys. Bio. / Networks (joint DY/BP/CPP/SOE)

BP 16.32: Poster

Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 09:30–12:30, P1

Motifs in Triadic Random Graphs Based on Steiner Triple Systems — •Marco Winkler and Jörg Reichardt — Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Würzburg, Germany

Conventionally, pairwise relationships between nodes are considered to be the fundamental building blocks of complex networks. However, over the last decade so-called motifs have attracted much attention. It has been hypothesized that these motifs, rather than links, serve as the building blocks of network structures. Although the relation between a network's topology and its function, its robustness against perturbations, or its efficiency in spreading information, is the central theme of network science, there is still a lack of sound generative models needed for testing the functional role of subgraph motifs. Our work aims to overcome this limitation. We employ the framework of exponential random graph models (ERGMs) to define models based on triadic substructures. The fact that only a small portion of triads can actually be set independently poses a challenge for the formulation of such models. To overcome this obstacle, we use Steiner triple systems (STSs). These are partitions of sets of nodes into pair-disjoint triads, which thus can be specified independently. Combining the concepts of ERGMs and STSs, we suggest generative models capable of generating ensembles of networks with nontrivial triadic Z-score profiles. Further, we discover inevitable correlations between the abundance of triad patterns, which occur solely for statistical reasons and need to be taken into account when discussing the functional implications of motif statistics.