PATH ANALYSIS OF YIELD AND ITS PRIMARY COMPONENTS IN SNAP BEAN

摘要

Correlation among characteristics knowledge has a great importance in breeding programs, mainly when the characteristics simultaneous selection is desired. According to Vencovsky and Barriga (1992), correlations studies do not permit to have conclusions about causes and effects between variables, being the correlation just an associative measure. However, the path analysis method permits to have those conclusions, because it studies the direct and indirect characters effects on one basic variable, whose estimates are obtained by regression equation (Cruz; Regazzi; Carneiro, 2012). The objective of this study was to investigate the correlations among the yield of pods (YOP) and its primary components: pods average number per plant (PANP), pods average weight (PAW), pods length (PL) and pods diameter (PD) in direct and indirect effects, to determine the relative importance of each one of them.