Constructing categories for polychotomous variates.docVIP

H. IWAISAKI Department of Animal Science, College of Agriculture Kyoto University, Kyoto-shi 606, Japan Summary The objective of this study was to find, using numerical methods, a configuration of response categories which maximizes the ratio of heritability in a discrete scale to that in the underlying normal scale for polychotomous characters. It is shown that to maximize this ratio it is necessary to construct a symmetric discrete distribution with symmetrically spaced weights for the categories The thresholds that maximize the ratio are located at the arithmetic mean of the expe