The purpose of variable selection is to pre-select a subset consisting of the significant variables or to eliminate the redundant variables from all the candidate variables of a system under study prior to model term detection. It is required that the selected significant variables alone should sufficiently represent the system. Generally, not all the model terms, which are produced by combining different variables, make an equal contribution to the system output and terms, which make little contribution, can be omitted. A parsimonious representation, which contains only the significant terms, can often be obtained without the loss of representational accuracy by eliminating the redundant terms. Based on these observations, a new variable and term selection algorithm is proposed in this paper. The term detection algorithm can be applied to the general class of non-linear modelling problems which can be expressed as a linear-in-the-parameters form. The variable selection procedure is based on locally linear and cross-bilinear models, which are used together with the forward orthogonal least squares (OLS) and error reduction ratio (ERR) approach to determine the significant terms and to pre-select the important/ variables for both time series and input-output systems. Several numerical examples are provided to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the new approach.