DAGitty’s shortcuts

A short cheatsheet of all DAGitty’s shortcuts for researchers working with directed acyclic graphs

DAGitty is a free and open source tool to build directed acyclic graphs (DAG) or causal inference diagrams. The online version of DAGitty and can be found here http://dagitty.net/.

The application came with plenty of shortcuts to make you life easier, however these are kind of hidden. Here is a little cheat-sheet to remind them :

Shortcut	Action
n	add a new variable
r	rename a variable
e	turn a node in exposure
o	turn a variable in outcome
u	make a variable unobserved
a	adjust for a variable
del or d	delete a variable

Create a DAG

1. List potential variable that can influence with exposure and outcome
2. Add them to the DAG
3. Turn variable for which data is available as adjusted variable
4. Check whether the model is correctly adjusted on the right panel

Export DAG

• Save it online using email (keep node position)
• Save DAG as text (keep node position, can be tracked to git repo)

Variable types

• adjusted variable: variable that can be included in the model
• unobserved variable: varaible that is not available in the dataset