Auditing bipartite motif interpretations: a worked example with conservation checks and open-path decomposition

📅 2026-09-18
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本文通过度序列分析和路径分解方法,审计了二分网络中的模体解释问题,以旅游评级网络为例进行了实证分析。
📝 Abstract
Motif profiles of bipartite agent-object networks, such as tourist-site visits and customer-item transactions, are read as evidence about structural roles and about differences between networks, often without asking what the two degree sequences already fix. In a simple bipartite graph the induced k-fan count on one node type is a sum of degree combinations, so it has zero variance under a null that preserves both degree sequences. We apply this known result to a reconstructed tourism rating network of 17 tourists, 80 sites and 637 edges, the sole inferential worked example, and, as a provenance-limited illustration, to published motif-instance aggregates over 36 monthly luxury customer-item networks. The four fan classes are exact functions of the degree sequences: in the tourism network the raw fan counts and the size-3 two-fan ratio (84.7% fan-out) restate those sequences. The published luxury counts require at least 89,502 customer-item edges against 26,451 reported transactions, so their 99.8% fan-in is reported as a descriptive value only. Against a hard bipartite configuration null, the four-cycle count is degree-consistent (z about +1.0) and the open path is deficient (z about -5.8) by 2,243 instances, 2.4% of the null mean; the deficit survives every leave-one-tourist-out re-run (z -4.5 to -8.1). An exact identity splits it at the point estimate into 64.4% mixing and 35.6% four-cycle, but that split is not an attribution: the observed mixing term lies below all 500 null samples, the two components are almost collinear under the null (r = 0.968), and the mixing share ranges from 36.6% to 116.5% under leave-one-tourist-out deletion. The deficit is extreme relative to the sampled null, while its class-level interpretation is undetermined and unstable. We give a four-step pre-interpretation check and a reference implementation.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

bipartite networks
motif interpretations
degree sequences
structural roles
network differences
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

bipartite motif
degree sequence
null hypothesis
open path decomposition
conservation checks
T
Tengfei Shao
Global Education Center, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan