  Challenging research in various fields has driven a wide range of
methodological advances in variable selection for regression models with
high-dimensional predictors. In comparison, selection of nonlinear functions in
models with additive predictors has been considered only more recently. Several
competing suggestions have been developed at about the same time and often do
not refer to each other. This article provides a state-of-the-art review on
function selection, focusing on penalized likelihood and Bayesian concepts,
relating various approaches to each other in a unified framework. In an
empirical comparison, also including boosting, we evaluate several methods
through applications to simulated and real data, thereby providing some
guidance on their performance in practice.
