dichotomous key

(noun)

a tool for identification of plants and animals, written as a sequence of paired questions, the choice of which determines the next pair of questions until a name or identification is reached

Related Terms

Examples of dichotomous key in the following topics:

  • Averages of Qualitative and Ranked Data

    • Examples include, on one hand, dichotomous data with dichotomous (or dichotomized) values such as "sick" versus "healthy" when measuring health, "guilty" versus "innocent" when making judgments in courts, or "wrong/false" versus "right/true" when measuring truth value.
    • On the other hand, non-dichotomous data consisting of a spectrum of values is also included, such as "completely agree," "mostly agree," "mostly disagree," and "completely disagree" when measuring opinion .
    • An opinion survey is an example of a non-dichotomous data set on the ordinal scale for which the central tendency can be described by the median or the mode.

  • Leaf Structure and Arrangment

    • Ginkgo biloba is an example of a plant with dichotomous venation.
    • (c) The Ginkgo biloba tree has dichotomous venation.

  • Organizational structure and human resources management

    • Disadvantages: On the other hand, the existence of an international division encourages the organization to approach their business in an artificially dichotomous manner.
    • In this case, two or more dimensions may have direct links to the head of the organization (see Exhibit 48) and key individuals throughout the organization may actually report to more than one dimension.

  • Collecting and Measuring Data

    • Examples of ordinal data include dichotomous values such as "sick" versus "healthy" when measuring health, "guilty" versus "innocent" when making judgments in courts, "false" versus "true", when measuring truth value.
    • Examples also include non-dichotomous data consisting of a spectrum of values, such as "completely agree", "mostly agree", "mostly disagree", or "completely disagree" when measuring opinion.

  • Introduction

    • Models used in this theory include Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (http://www.cpp-db.com/products/mbti/index.asp), which measures personality in dichotomous terms -- extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception, and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter(http://keirsey.com/), which classifies people as rationals, idealists, artisans, or guardians.

  • F-groups

    • One approach would be to simply dichotomize the data (maybe at several different cut-points).

  • Key Signatures

    • The first sharp in a key signature is always F sharp; the second sharp in a key signature is always (a perfect fifth away) C sharp; the third is always G sharp, and so on, all the way to B sharp.
    • After D major, name the next four sharp keys, and name the sharp that is added with each key.
    • E minor is the first sharp minor key; the first sharp added in both major and minor keys is always F sharp.
    • Name the next three sharp minor keys, and the sharp that is added in each key.
    • After B flat major, name the next four flat keys, and name the flat that is added with each key.

  • Key Signature

    • If the key contains sharps, the name of the key is one half step higher than the last sharp in the key signature.
    • If the key contains flats, the name of the key signature is the name of the second-to-last flat in the key signature.
    • In flat keys, the second-to-last flat names the key.
    • It is easiest just to memorize the key signatures for these two very common keys.
    • If the music is in a minor key, it will be in the relative minor of the major key for that key signature.

  • Two-mode correspondence analysis

    • To illustrate the application of correspondence analysis, we've dichotomized the political donor and initiatives data by assigning a value of 1 if an actor gave a donation either in favor or against an initiative, and assigning a zero if they did not participate in the campaign on a particular initiative.

  • Transforming data values

    • Transform>Dichotomize is a tool that is useful for turning valued data into binary data.
    • That is, if we have measured the strength of ties among actors (e.g. on a scale from 0 = no tie to 5 = strong tie), the "dichotomize" can be used to turn this into data that represent only the absence or presence of a tie (e.g. zero or one).
    • Many of the tools in UCINET that are designed for binary data will arbitrarily dichotomize interval or ordinal data in ways that might not be appropriate for your problem.
    • The "dichotomize" tool could be used to create the necessary matrices.