This paper reports a Hammerstein modeling study of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) stack using least squares support vector machines (LS-SVM). PEMFC is a complex nonlinear, multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) system that is hard to model by traditional methodologies. Due to the generalization performance of LS-SVM being independent of the dimensionality of the input data and the particularly simple structure of the Hammerstein model, a MIMO SVM-ARX (linear autoregression model with exogenous input) Hammerstein model is used to represent the PEMFC stack in this paper. The linear model parameters and the static nonlinearity can be obtained simultaneously by solving a set of linear equations followed by the singular value decomposition (SVD). The simulation tests demonstrate the obtained SVM-ARX Hammerstein model can efficiently approximate the dynamic behavior of a PEMFC stack. Furthermore, based on the proposed SVM-ARX Hammerstein model, valid control strategy studies such as predictive control, robust control can be developed. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.