Gain strategies for variable selection and model building through the Research Methodology Roundtable: Approaches to Model Building from the Society of Critical Care Medicine's Discovery, the Critical Care Research Network. This new roundtable format will allow for interaction with experts and flexibility in learning.

Model building requires making the critical decisions of which and how many independent variables to include in the model. Missing important independent variables can severely impact the model's fitness and bias-both the associations and their magnitude. Including too many independent variables increases the complexity of the model, causing spurious fits and limiting its generalizability.