In order to understand the relationship between the influencing factors of water traffic accidents and prevent the occurrence of water traffic accidents，based on the collected investigation reports of water traffic accidents, four main influencing factors , namely human factors, management factors, ship factors, environmental factors and 78 sub-influencing factors were classified and sorted out, and on the basis of co-occurrence analysis, an adjacency matrix was constructed and the Jaccard index was calculated to establish a network model of water traffic accidents causes.  The statistical indicators such as the degree, network the diameter, average path length, clustering coefficient, proximity centrality, and intermediate centrality of the causal network were calculated and analyzed to determine the key factors affecting water traffic safety. The comprehensive evaluation model for multi-attribute decision-making of network nodes was constructed to determine the importance of each influencing factor. The results show that human factors and management factors are dominant, among which, negligence in observation, misjudgment, failure to take effective measures, insufficient safety awareness, insufficient use of good ship skills, unqualified manning, lack of safety management, and improper emergency response are the key influencing factors.