Motif Conservation Laws for the Configuration Model

Abstract

The observation that some subgraphs, called motifs, appear more often in real networks than in their randomized counterparts has attracted much attention in the scientific community. In the prevalent approach the detection of motifs is based on comparing subgraph counts in a network with their counterparts in the configuration model with the same degree distribution as the network. In this short note we derive conservation laws that relate motif counts in the configuration model.