Support vector machines(SVM) may perform poorly in the presence of noise variables; in addition, it is difficult to identify the importance of each variable in the resulting classifier. A feature selection can improve the interpretability and the accuracy of SVM. Most existing studies concern feature selection in the linear SVM through penalty functions yielding sparse solutions. Note that one usually adopts nonlinear kernels for the accuracy of classification in practice. Hence feature selection is still desirable for nonlinear SVMs. In this paper, we compare the performances of nonlinear feature selection methods such as component selection and smoothing operator(COSSO) and kernel iterative feature extraction(KNIFE) on simulated and real data sets.