What is Zen?

The construction, analysis, and modeling of networks has become common-place in fields as diverse as psychology, economics, physics, ecology, and history. Zen is a library that provides a high-speed, easy-to-use API for loading, analyzing, visualizing, and manipulating networks in Python. By using a hybrid of Python and Cython code, it combines the speed and low memory overhead of C with the ease-of-use of Python. The result is a library that truly makes working with networks easy and fast. Rather than having to think around the tool’s limitations, Zen simply allows you to use it.

Zen is easy

Designed with research and prototype programming as a focal point, a wide array of activities including graph construction, randomization, visualization, and metric computation can be done in one or two lines of code. In addition, attention has been paid to readability, so that the code you write in Zen will be easy for you and others to understand later on.

Zen is fast

Benchmarks show that Zen is much faster than other popular network libraries. In addition to being over 100x faster than some libraries, Zen can also work on networks that are impossibly large for them to load.

Zen is released under the BSD license.