Here's a less flexible, but more concise version of Mark Lodato's wrapper: It takes the fields and defaults as a dictionary.
import collections
def namedtuple_with_defaults(typename, fields_dict):
T = collections.namedtuple(typename, ' '.join(fields_dict.keys()))
T.__new__.__defaults__ = tuple(fields_dict.values())
return T
Example:
In[1]: fields = {'val': 1, 'left': 2, 'right':3}
In[2]: Node = namedtuple_with_defaults('Node', fields)
In[3]: Node()
Out[3]: Node(val=1, left=2, right=3)
In[4]: Node(4,5,6)
Out[4]: Node(val=4, left=5, right=6)
In[5]: Node(val=10)
Out[5]: Node(val=10, left=2, right=3)