In this communication, an extensive set of 1077 experimental electrical conductivity data for 54 ionic liquids (ILs) was collected from 21 different literature sources. Using this dataset, a reliable least square support vector machine-group contribution (LSSVM-GC) model has been developed, which employs a total of 22 sub-structures in addition to the temperature to represent/predict the electrical conductivity of ILs. In order to distinguish the effects of the anion and cation on the electrical conductivity of ILs, 11 sub-structures related to the chemical structure of anions, and 11 sub-structures related to the chemical structure of cations were implemented. The proposed model produces a low average absolute relative deviation (AARD) of less than 3.3% taking into consideration all 1077 experimental data values. (C) 2013 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.