Motif-based mean-field approximation of interacting particles on clustered networks

Abstract

Interacting particles on graphs are routinely used to study magnetic behaviour in physics, disease spread in epidemiology, and opinion dynamics in social sciences. The literature on mean-field approximations of such systems for large graphs is limited to cluster-free graphs for which standard approximations based on degrees and pairs are often reasonably accurate. Here, we propose a motif-based mean-field approximation that considers higher-order subgraph structures in large clustered graphs. Numerically, our equations agree with stochastic simulations where existing methods fail.