Variable selection in Functional Additive Regression Models

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of variable selection when some of the variables have a functional nature and can be mixed with other type of variables (scalar, multivariate, directional, etc). Our proposal begins with a simple null model and sequentially selects a new variable to be incorporated into the model. For the sake of simplicity, this paper only uses additive models. However, the proposed algorithm may assess the type of contribution (linear, non linear, …) of each variable. The algorithm have showed quite promising results when applied to real data sets