We consider the problem of counting motifs in bipartite affiliation networks,
such as author-paper, user-product, and actor-movie relations. We focus on
counting the number of occurrences of a "butterfly", a complete 2×2
biclique, the simplest cohesive higher-order structure in a bipartite graph.
Our main contribution is a suite of randomized algorithms that can quickly
approximate the number of butterflies in a graph with a provable guarantee on
accuracy. An experimental evaluation on large real-world networks shows that
our algorithms return accurate estimates within a few seconds, even for
networks with trillions of butterflies and hundreds of millions of edges.Comment: 28 pages, 5 tables, 6 figure