In order to realize direct thrust control instead of conventional sensors-based control for aero-engine, a thrust estimator with high accuracy is designed by using the boosting technique to improve the performance of least squares support vector regression （LSSVR）. There exist two distinct features compared with the conven- tional boosting technique： （1） Sampling without replacement is used to avoid numerical instability for modeling LSSVR. （2） To realize the sparseness of LSSVR and reduce the computational complexity, only a subset of the training samples is used to construct LSSVR. Thus, this boosting method for LSSVR is called the boosting sparse LSSVR （BSLSSVR）. Finally, simulation results show that BSLSSVR-based thrust estimator can satisfy the requirement of direct thrust control, i.e. , maximum absolute value of relative error of thrust estimation is not more than 5‰.
