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data.tree

An R package to manage hierarchical data and tree structures

Hierarchical data is ubiquitous in statistics and programming (XML, search trees, family trees, classification, file system, etc.). However, no general-use tree data structure is available in base R. Where tabular data has data.frame, hierarchical data is often modeled in lists of lists or similar makeshifts. These structures are often difficult to manage. This is where the data.tree package steps in. It lets you build trees of hierarchical data for various uses: to print, plot and visualize, to generate breakdowns, to integrate with html widgets, to rapid prototype search algorithms, to test out new classification ideas, and much more.

Tree structures can be created programmatically, or by conversion. The package provides functionality to convert from and to various formats such as data.frames, list of lists, dendrograms, partykit, ape phylo, igraph, JSON, YAML, and more.

Learn More

To get started, you might want to read the introduction vignette. There is also a vignette containing some examples and applications.

The manual is here

Finally, you'll find more examples and background information on my blog.

NOTE:

The latest from github dev branch may have some breaking changes compared to CRAN. See NEWS for details.

Conventions:

Coding Conventions: Google Style Guide, see https://google.github.io/styleguide/Rguide.xml

Versioning Conventions: SemanticVersioning. See http://semver.org/ for details

Branching Conventions: GitFlow. See https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow

Pull Requests: Very welcome! Please branch from the dev branch.

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Version

Install

install.packages('data.tree')

Monthly Downloads

27,915

Version

0.7.3

License

GPL (>= 2)

Issues

Pull Requests

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Repository

http://github.com/gluc/data.tree

Maintainer

Christoph Glur

Last Published

August 25th, 2025

Functions in data.tree (0.7.3)

Clone a tree (creates a deep copy)

CreateRandomTree

Create a tree for demo and testing

CreateRegularTree

Create a tree for demo and testing

Cumulate values among siblings

Determine the number a Node has after conversion to a phylo object

NODE_RESERVED_NAMES_CONST

Names that are reserved by the Node class.

Aggregate child values of a Node, recursively.

Test whether all node names are unique.

Executes a function on a set of nodes

Find a node by name in the (sub-)tree

Sample Data: A Simple Company with Departments

as.Node.BinaryTree

Convert a a SplitNode from the party package to a data.tree structure.

Sort children of a Node or an entire data.tree structure

Plot a graph, or get a graphviz dot representation of the tree

Convert an object to a data.tree data structure

as.Node.data.frame

Convert a data.frame to a data.tree structure

Check if a Node is not a leaf

Check if a Node is not a root

CheckNameReservedWord

Checks whether name is a reserved word, as defined in NODE_RESERVED_NAMES_CONST.

Climb a tree from parent to children, by provided criteria.

Traverse a Tree and Collect Values

DefaultPlotHeight

Calculates the height of a Node given the height of the root.

Find the distance between two nodes of the same tree

FormatFixedDecimal

Format a Number as a Decimal

Navigate to another node by relative path.

Create a data.tree Structure With Nodes

Write a data.tree structure to Newick notation

Traverse a tree or a sub-tree

Convert a a party from the partykit package to a data.tree structure.

Convert a phylo object from the ape package to a Node

Print a Node in a human-readable fashion.

as.data.frame.Node

Convert a data.tree structure to a data.frame

as.dendrogram.Node

Convert a Node to a dendrogram

Convert a Node to a phylo object from the ape package.

averageBranchingFactor

Calculate the average number of branches each non-leaf has

Format a Number as a Percentage

Traverse a Tree and Assign Values

Set a formatter function on a specific node

as.Node.dendrogram

Convert a dendrogram to a data.tree Node

Convert a nested list structure to a data.tree structure

data.tree: Hierarchical Data Structures

Get an attribute from a Node.

Reverts the sort order of a Node's children.

Convert a data.tree structure to an igraph network

Convert a data.tree structure to a list-of-list structure

Check if a Node is the root

Sample Data: Data Used by the ID3 Vignette

Check if a Node is a leaf