Selecting important independent variables in linear regression models (Q1113231)

A large body of literature exists on the techniques for selecting the important variables in linear regression analysis. Many of these techniques are ad hoc in nature and have not been studied from a theoretical viewpoint. In this paper we discuss some of the more commonly used techniques and propose a selection procedure based on the statistical selection and ranking approach. This procedure is easy to compute and apply. The procedure depends on the goodness of fit of the model and the total error associated with it.