Motivated by applications in social network community analysis, we introduce
a new clustering paradigm termed motif clustering. Unlike classical clustering,
motif clustering aims to minimize the number of clustering errors associated
with both edges and certain higher order graph structures (motifs) that
represent "atomic units" of social organizations. Our contributions are
two-fold: We first introduce motif correlation clustering, in which the goal is
to agnostically partition the vertices of a weighted complete graph so that
certain predetermined "important" social subgraphs mostly lie within the same
cluster, while "less relevant" social subgraphs are allowed to lie across
clusters. We then proceed to introduce the notion of motif covers, in which the
goal is to cover the vertices of motifs via the smallest number of (near)
cliques in the graph. Motif cover algorithms provide a natural solution for
overlapping clustering and they also play an important role in latent feature
inference of networks. For both motif correlation clustering and its extension
introduced via the covering problem, we provide hardness results, algorithmic
solutions and community detection results for two well-studied social networks