Is there a library for python that will generate hierarchy/tree diagrams?

Question

The title kind of says it all really. Matplotlib is fantastic for most graphing applications, but I can't seem to find anything that will make hierarchy or tree diagrams. Does anyone have experience with a package they would wish to recommend?

Thanks in advance for your time,

Dan

Answer 1

pydot

Answer 2

While pydot (an interface to the graphviz library) is a great library, unfortunately its layout algorithms won't make the trees look like trees (though there are some hacks to do it, by adding 'invisible' graph nodes).

If you care about that, the O'Reilly book "Programming Collective Intelligence" has code that uses the PIL library to draw trees (such as those that would be the result of a decision tree learning algorithm). Here is a link to the book's source code. The images aren't as pretty as those made by graphviz library, since they are bitmaps and not vectorial, though.

Answer 3

networkx uses both pydot or matplotlib to give a very concise and general network drawing package.