causal_networkx.graphs.dag.DAG.to_dot_graph

DAG.to_dot_graph(to_dagitty=False)

Convert to ‘dot’ graph representation as a string.

The DOT language for graphviz is what is commonly used in R’s dagitty package. This is a string representation of the graph. However, this converts to a string format that is not 100% representative of DOT [1]. See Notes for more information.

Parameters:

to_dagitty : bool

Whether to conform to the Dagitty format, where the string begins with dag { instead of strict digraph {.

Returns:

dot_graph : str

A string representation in DOT format for the graph.

Notes

The output of this function can be immediately plugged into the dagitty online portal for drawing a graph.

For example, if we have a mixed edge graph, with directed and bidirected arrows (i.e. a causal DAG). Specifically, if we had 0 -> 1 with a latent confounder, we would get the following output:

strict digraph {
    0;
    1;
    0 -> 1;
    0 <-> 1;
}

To represent for example a bidirected edge, A <-> B, the DOT format would make you use A -> B [dir=both], but this is not as intuitive. A <-> B also complies with dagitty and other approaches to drawing graphs in Python/R.

References

[1] https://github.com/pydot/pydot