Simon, thanks for the reply, I guess I'm pretty much up to date using mgcv 1.7-22. Upgrading to R 3.0.0 also didn't do any change.
Unfortunately using method="REML" does not make any difference: ####### first with "select=FALSE" > fit<-gam(target > ~s(mgs)+s(gsd)+s(mud)+s(ssCmax),family=quasi(link=log),data=wspe1,method="REML",select=F) > summary(fit) Family: quasi Link function: log Formula: target ~ s(mgs) + s(gsd) + s(mud) + s(ssCmax) Parametric coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) -4.724 7.462 -0.633 0.527 Approximate significance of smooth terms: edf Ref.df F p-value s(mgs) 3.118 3.492 0.099 0.974 s(gsd) 6.377 7.044 15.596 <2e-16 *** s(mud) 8.837 8.971 18.832 <2e-16 *** s(ssCmax) 3.886 4.051 2.342 0.052 . --- Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 R-sq.(adj) = 0.403 Deviance explained = 40.6% REML score = 33186 Scale est. = 8.7812e+05 n = 4511 #### Then using "select=T" > fit2<-gam(target > ~s(mgs)+s(gsd)+s(mud)+s(ssCmax),family=quasi(link=log),data=wspe1,method="REML",select=TRUE) > summary(fit2) Family: quasi Link function: log Formula: target ~ s(mgs) + s(gsd) + s(mud) + s(ssCmax) Parametric coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) -6.406 5.239 -1.223 0.222 Approximate significance of smooth terms: edf Ref.df F p-value s(mgs) 2.844 8 25.43 <2e-16 *** s(gsd) 6.071 9 14.50 <2e-16 *** s(mud) 6.875 8 21.79 <2e-16 *** s(ssCmax) 3.787 8 18.42 <2e-16 *** --- Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 R-sq.(adj) = 0.4 Deviance explained = 40.1% REML score = 33203 Scale est. = 8.8359e+05 n = 4511 I played around with other families/link functions with no success regarding the "select" behaviour. Well, look at the structure of my data: <http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4664586/screen-capture-1.png> All possible predictor variables in principle look like this, and taken alone, each and every is significant according to p-value (but not all can at the same time). In theory, the target variable should be a hypersurface in 11dim space with lots of noise, but interaction of more than 2 vars gets costly (not to think of 11) and often enough (also without interaction) the solution does not converge at minimal step size. If it does, results are usually not as good as without interaction. Any comment/advice on model setup is warmly welcome here. Since I don't want to try out all possible 2047 combinations of up to eleven predictor variables for each target variable, I currently see no other way than educated manual guessing. If you know another way of (semi-)automated model tunig/reduction, I would very much appreciate it best regards, Jan -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/mgcv-how-select-significant-predictor-vars-when-using-gam-select-TRUE-using-automatic-optimization-tp4664510p4664586.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.