If your data has relationships that involve more than two parties at once — co-authorship, multi-party transactions, metabolic pathways, group chats — you've hit the ceiling of regular graphs. What you need is a hypergraph, where a single edge (called a hyperedge) can connect any number of vertices simultaneously.
The problem: Python's graph ecosystem barely covers this case.
NetworkX
NetworkX is the first thing most people reach for, and with good reason — it's excellent for graphs. But it has no native hypergraph type. The standard workaround is to model each hyperedge as an extra "hub" node connected to all its members, then hide the hub nodes in your application logic.
This works until you need to:
