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
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life fo ...
, the term polychotomy can also be considered a historically-based misspelling of
polytomy
An internal node of a phylogenetic tree is described as a polytomy or multifurcation if (i) it is in a rooted tree and is linked to three or more child subtrees or (ii) it is in an unrooted tree and is attached to four or more branches. A tr ...
.
[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
{{Reflist
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