A comparison of approaches to stepwise regression on variables sensitivities in building simulation and analysis

•The robustness of stepwise regression is irrespective of selection approach.•The linear regression model constructed by AIC has a high risk of overfitting, especially when the sample size is small.•A mixture of discretized-continuous and categorical variables can be used for global SA.•For stepwise regression, increasing sample size can identify more sensitive variables, but the importance of highly sensitive variables remains the same.•The importance of variables for design objectives and constraints is better to be classified through more than one sensitivity indexes.