The combustion characteristics of Mg/polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) were studied with support vector machine (SVM) method, in order to improve the accuracy of combustion characteristics forecasting for the pyrotechnic composition. The predicted values were compared with that of experiments also. The results show that the predicted and experimental values agree with each other, and this method has high accuracy. The prediction maximum relative errors of the combustion velocity, the combustion temperature and the combustion heat are 9.96%, 9.84%, 4.20% respectively.