A polychotomy (päl′i kät′ə mē; plural ''polychotomies'') is a division or separation into many parts or classes. Polychotomy is a generalization of
dichotomy
A dichotomy is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets). In other words, this couple of parts must be
* jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and
* mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simulta ...
, which is a polychotomy of exactly two parts. In
evolutionary biology, the term polychotomy can also be considered a historically-based misspelling of
polytomy.
[Weiss, David J. (1995). “Polychtomous or Polytomous?,” Applied Psychological Measurement, Vol. 19, No. 1, p. 4]
See also
*
Polychotomous key
Polychotomous key refers to the number of alternatives which a decision point may have in a non-temporal hierarchy of independent variables. The number of alternatives are equivalent to the root or nth root of a mathematical or logical variable. D ...
References
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External links
Examples of usage
Another Approach to Polychotomous Classification
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20111030150413/http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/4/497.abstract The Development of a Hierarchical Polychotomous ADL-IADL Scale for Noninstitutionalized Elders]
Probabilistic Forecasting - A PrimerStructured polychotomous machine diagnosis of multiple cancer types using gene expression
Biological concepts