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Purpose For autonomous vehicles, trajectory prediction of surrounding vehicles is beneficial to improving the situational awareness of dynamic and stochastic traffic environments, which is a crucial and indispensable element to realize highly automated driving. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the overall framework consists of two parts: first, a novel driver characteristic and intention estimation (DCIE) model is built to indicate the higher-level information of the vehicle using its low-level motion variables; then, according to the estimation results of the DCIE model, a classified Gaussian process model is established for probabilistic vehicle trajectory prediction under different motion patterns. Findings The whole method is later applied and analyzed in the highway lane-change scenarios with the parameters of models learned from the public naturalistic driving data set. Compared with other traditional methods, the performance of this proposed approach is proved superior, demonstrated by the higher accuracy in the long prediction horizon and a more reasonable description of uncertainty. Originality/value This hierarchical approach is proposed to make trajectory prediction accurately both in the short term and long term, which can also deal with the uncertainties caused by the perception system or indeterminate vehicle behaviors.