  Networks are a fundamental tool for modeling complex systems in a variety of
domains including social and communication networks as well as biology and
neuroscience. Small subgraph patterns in networks, called network motifs, are
crucial to understanding the structure and function of these systems. However,
the role of network motifs in temporal networks, which contain many timestamped
links between the nodes, is not yet well understood.
  Here we develop a notion of a temporal network motif as an elementary unit of
temporal networks and provide a general methodology for counting such motifs.
We define temporal network motifs as induced subgraphs on sequences of temporal
edges, design fast algorithms for counting temporal motifs, and prove their
runtime complexity. Our fast algorithms achieve up to 56.5x speedup compared to
a baseline method. Furthermore, we use our algorithms to count temporal motifs
in a variety of networks. Results show that networks from different domains
have significantly different motif counts, whereas networks from the same
domain tend to have similar motif counts. We also find that different motifs
occur at different time scales, which provides further insights into structure
and function of temporal networks.
