Perform clustering from a similarity matrix
I am not sure I fully understand your question, but generally the metric you use to build a DAG needs to be understood in terms of how you interpret relevant results.
That said, a cluster map sounds like a good match for your use case. That is, a correlation matrix with sorted values according to linkage clustering on your datapoints. See below an example:

You can easily experiment with something like this using seaborn library and seaborn.clustermap.