LINC: A motif counting algorithm for uncertain graphs

In graph applications (e.g., biological and social networks), various analytics tasks (e.g., clustering and community search) are carried out to extract insight from large and complex graphs. Central to these tasks is the counting of the number of motifs, which are graphs with a few nodes. Recently, researchers have developed several fast motif counting algorithms. Most of these solutions assume that graphs are deterministic, i.e., the graph edges are certain to exist. However, due to measurement and statistical prediction errors, this assumption may not hold, and hence the analysis quality can be affected. To address this issue, we examine how to count motifs on uncertain graphs, whose edges only exist probabilistically. Particularly, we propose a solution framework that can be used by existing deterministic motif counting algorithms. We further propose an approximation algorithm. Extensive experiments on real datasets show that our algorithms are more effective and efficient than existing solutions.