Selection of environmental covariates using stepwise regression

Stepwise regression is the iterative step-by-step design of a regression model requiring the option of independent variables to be used in a final model. The Stepwise regression is used to identify the most influencing variable. It is one of the statistical techniques for reducing the dimension of the data. The study was conducted in the Sarkarsamakulam block of the Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu with 17 profile points. A total of 33 environmental covariates are used for this analysis and to make the analysis easier and accurate the covariates data has to be reduced. From the result, the least influencing variable can be omitted for further analysis. Totally ten variables were selected using this regression for further analysis. Hence it is one of the easiest methods to predict the most influencing variable using R software.