MoTTo: Scalable Motif Counting with Time-aware Topology Constraint for Large-scale Temporal Graphs

Temporal motifs are recurring subgraph patterns in temporal graphs, and are present in various domains such as social networks, fraud detection, and biological networks. Despite their significance, counting temporal motifs efficiently remains a challenge, particularly on moderately sized datasets with millions of motif instances. To address this challenge, we propose a novel algorithm called Scalable <u>Mo</u>tif Counting with <u>T</u>ime-aware <u>T</u>opology C<u>o</u>nstraint (MoTTo). MoTTo focuses on accurately counting temporal motifs with up to three nodes and three edges. It first utilizes a topology constraint-based pruning strategy to eliminate nodes that cannot participate in forming temporal motifs before the counting process. Then, it adopts a time-aware topology constraint-based pruning strategy to split large-scale datasets into independent partitions and filter out the unrelated ones, ensuring that the counting results remain unaffected. By investigating the second pruning strategy, we also find that MoTTo can be implemented in a multi-thread manner, further accelerating the counting process significantly. Experimental results on several real-world datasets of varying sizes demonstrate that MoTTo outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, achieving up to a nine-fold improvement in total temporal motif counting. Specifically, the efficiency of counting triangular temporal motifs is enhanced by up to 31 times compared to state-of-the-art baselines.