Draw different color for nodes in networkx based on their node value

Question

I have a large graph of nodes and directed edges. Furthermore, I have an additional list of values assigned to each node.

I now want to change the color of each node

Answer 1

For the general case, in which we have a list of values indicating some attribute of a node, and we want to assign a colour to the given node which gives a sense of scale of that attribute (reds to blues for instance), here's one approach:

import matplotlib as mpl
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from pylab import rcParams
import networkx as nx

G = nx.Graph()
G.add_edges_from([('A', 'D'), ('Z', 'D'), ('F', 'J'), ('A', 'E'), ('E', 'J'),('Z', 'K'), ('B', 'A'), ('B', 'D'), ('A', 'J'), ('Z', 'F'),('Z', 'D'), ('A', 'B'), ('J', 'D'), ('J', 'E'), ('Z', 'J'),('K', 'J'), ('B', 'F'), ('B', 'J'), ('A', 'Z'), ('Z', 'E'),('C', 'Z'), ('C', 'A')])

Say that we have the following dictionary mapping a each node to a given value:

color_lookup = {k:v for v, k in enumerate(sorted(set(G.nodes())))}
# {'A': 0, 'B': 1, 'C': 2, 'D': 3, 'E': 4, 'F': 5, 'J': 6, 'K': 7, 'Z': 8}

What we could do is to use mpl.colors.Normalize to normalize the values in color_lookup to the range [0,1] based on the minimum and maximum values that the nodes take, and then matplotlib.cm.ScalarMappable to map the normalized values to colours in a colourmap, here I'll be using mpl.cm.coolwarm:

low, *_, high = sorted(color_lookup.values())
norm = mpl.colors.Normalize(vmin=low, vmax=high, clip=True)
mapper = mpl.cm.ScalarMappable(norm=norm, cmap=mpl.cm.coolwarm)

rcParams['figure.figsize'] = 12, 7
nx.draw(G, 
        nodelist=color_lookup,
        node_size=1000,
        node_color=[mapper.to_rgba(i) 
                    for i in color_lookup.values()], 
        with_labels=True)
plt.show()

For another colour map we'd just have to change the cmap parameter in mpl.cm.ScalarMappable:

mapper = mpl.cm.ScalarMappable(norm=norm, cmap=mpl.cm.summer)
nx.draw(G, 
        nodelist=color_lookup,
        node_size=1000,
        node_color=[mapper.to_rgba(i) 
                    for i in color_lookup.values()], 
        with_labels=True)
plt.show()

Where we'd get:

Similarly, we could set the colour of a node based on the degree of a node by defining a dictionary mapping all nodes to their corresponding degree, and taking the same steps as above:

d = dict(G.degree)
# {'A': 6, 'D': 4, 'Z': 7, 'F': 3, 'J': 7, 'E': 3, 'K': 2, 'B': 4, 'C': 2}
low, *_, high = sorted(d.values())
norm = mpl.colors.Normalize(vmin=low, vmax=high, clip=True)
mapper = mpl.cm.ScalarMappable(norm=norm, cmap=mpl.cm.coolwarm)

nx.draw(G, 
        nodelist=d,
        node_size=1000,
        node_color=[mapper.to_rgba(i) 
                    for i in d.values()], 
        with_labels=True,
        font_color='white')
plt.show()