Soft sensor techniques have been widely used to estimate product quality or other key indices which cannot be measured online by hardware sensors. Unfortunately, their estimation performance would deteriorate under certain circumstances, e.g., the change of the process characteristics, especially for global learning approaches. Meanwhile, local learning methods always only utilize input information to select relevant instances, which may lead to a waste of output information and inaccurate sample selection. To overcome these disadvantages, a new local modeling algorithm, adaptive local kernel-based learning scheme (ALKL) is proposed. First, a new similarity measurement using both input and output information is proposed and utilized in a supervised locality preserving projection technique to select relevant samples. Second, an adaptive weighted least squares support vector regression (AW-LSSVR) is employed to establish a local model and predict output indices for each query data. In AW-LSSVR, instead of using traditional cross-validation methods, the trade-off parameters are adjusted iteratively and the local model is updated recursively, which reduces the computational complexity a lot. The proposed ALKL is applied to an online crude oil endpoint prediction in an industrial fluidized catalytic cracking unit (FCCU) process. The experimental results demonstrate the high precision of our ALKL approach. (C) 2011 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.