Exhaustive CHAID continues to merge categories until only two categories exist, and then examines the series of merges to find the strongest association, and computes an adjusted p-value for that association. For continuous variables the data are divided into approximate deciles and used as an ordinal variable in the analyses. Colon
cancer affected status was used as the target variable
(1993 cases, 2410 controls), with ‘‘1’’ representing a
colon cancer case and ‘‘0’’ a control.