A quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) study is suggested for the prediction of auto-ignition temperatures (AIT) of organic compounds. Various kinds of molecular descriptors were calculated to represent the molecular structures of compounds, such as topological. charge, and geometric descriptors. The variable selection method of genetic algorithm (GA) was employed to select optimal subset of descriptors that have significant contribution to the overall AIT property from the large pool of calculated descriptors. The novel modeling method of support vector machine (SVM) was then employed to model the possible quantitative relationship existed between these selected descriptors and AIT property. The resulted model showed high prediction ability with the average absolute error being 28.88 degrees C, and the root mean square error being 36.86 for the prediction set, which are within the range of the experimental error of AIT measurements. The proposed method can be successfully used to predict the auto-ignition temperatures of organic compounds with only nine pre-selected theoretical descriptors which can be calculated directly from molecular structure alone. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.