Detecting and Analyzing Motifs in Large-Scale Online Transaction Networks

Motif detection is a graph algorithm that detects certain local structures in a graph. Although network motif has been studied in graph analytics, e.g., social network and biological network, it is yet unclear whether network motif is useful for analyzing online transaction network that is generated in applications such as instant messaging and e-commerce. In an online transaction network, each vertex represents a user’s account and each edge represents a money transaction between two users. In this work, we try to analyze online transaction networks with network motifs. We design motif-based vertex embedding that integrates motif counts and centrality measurements. Furthermore, we design a distributed framework to detect motifs in large-scale online transaction networks. Our framework obtains the edge directions using a bi-directional tagging method and avoids redundant detection with a reduced view of neighboring vertices. We implement the proposed framework under the parameter server architecture. In the evaluation, we analyze different kinds of online transaction networks w.r.t the distribution of motifs and evaluate the effectiveness of motif-based embedding in downstream graph analytical tasks. The experimental results also show that our proposed motif detection framework can efficiently handle large-scale graphs.