In order to improve the accuracy of performance parameter prediction of auxiliary power unit (APU), and solve the problem of parameter selection of support vector machine (SVM) model in practical use, adaptive mutation particle swarm optimization (PSO) is adopted to optimize the selection of penalty parameters and kernel parameters of SVM. And a prediction model of APU performance parameters based on adaptive mutation PSO algorithm is proposed. Furthermore, the influence of different prediction steps on short-term prediction accuracy is analyzed. The performance parameters of an APU are verified and compared with other prediction models. The experimental results show that for the prediction of exhaust gas temperature (EGT), the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of adaptive mutation PSO-SVM model is 47% lower than that of standard PSO-SVM model; for the prediction of oil temperature (OT), the MAPE of adaptive mutation PSO-SVM model is 29% lower than that of standard PSO-SVM, which provides some reference for short-term prediction of APU performance trend. © 2021, Editorial Office of Systems Engineering and Electronics. All right reserved.