The purpose of variable selection techniques is to select a subset of relevant variables for a particular learning algorithm in order to improve the accuracy of prediction model and improve the efficiency of the model. We conduct an empirical analysis to evaluate and compare seven well-known variable selection techniques for multiple linear regression model, which is one of the most commonly used regression model in practice. The variable selection techniques we apply are forward selection, backward elimination, stepwise selection, genetic algorithm (GA), ridge regression, lasso (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator) and elastic net. Based on the experiment with 49 regression data sets, it is found that GA resulted in the lowest error rates while lasso most significantly reduces the number of variables. In terms of computational efficiency, forward/backward elimination and lasso requires less time than the other techniques.