Problems in Defining Grading Schemes 4 Objectives 8 Procedures 9 CHAPTER II. INFORMATION THEORY AND ANALYSIS OF GRADING SCHEMES 10 Information Theory and Entropy 11 Information Theory and the Evaluation of Grading Schemes 20 An Application of Information Theory to Corn Grading 21 A Criteria for Evaluation of Grading Schemes 32 The Effect of Aggregating Data and Choice of Grade Class Boundaries 34 Relative information content 52 Information loss due to aggregation 54 Quality Reporting Based on a Surrogate Characteristic 56 Aggregation of Surrogate Measurements 60 Errors in Measurement 76 Quality Reporting of More Than One Characteristic 77 Application to Continuous Distributions 83 CHAPTER III. APPLICATION TO BEEF GRADES: DATA AND PROCEDURES 102 Description of Beef Grades 102 Carcass beef quality grades 102 iii Page Carcass beef yield grades 103 Slaughter cattle quality grades 104 Slaughter cattle yield grades 105 Feeder cattle grades 105 Data Requirements 106 Data 106 Study I 107 Study II 115 Study III 120 Analysis Procedures 123 Calculation of Information Measures 123 Selection of Variables 126 CHAPTER IV. APPLICATION TO BEEF GRADES: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 129 Grade Determining Analyses 129 Analyses of overall data 131 Analyses of within data 138 Quality Predictive Analyses 146 Analyses of overall data 146 Analyses of within data 166 Required Number of Grade Classes 176

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