The relationship between heat transfer effect and influencing factors in direct contact with evaporator is studied. It is important to optimize the design and setting of direct contact heat exchangers and further improve the heat transfer process of heat exchangers by understanding the influencing factors of direct contact evaporator. The methods used are grey correlation analysis, variational mode decomposition and least square support vector machine algorithm to calculate the experimental heat transfer coefficient. The conclusions are that grey relation analysis can find the complex relationship between different influencing factors and reduce the amount of data to improve the accuracy of prediction. Hence, the novelty of this paper is to propose a simple, efficient and accurate hybrid prediction model for VHTC prediction. The place where it goes beyond previous efforts in the literature is that different influencing factors on the heat transfer performance in the direct contact heat transfer process are considered. The results show that the prediction accuracy of the heat transfer coefficient can be improved by 7% by optimizing the data only with grey correlation analysis. The prediction accuracy can be improved up to 53% after using the hybrid model.