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Air quality prediction is an important research issue due to the increasing impact of air pollution on the urban environment. However, existing methods often fail to forecast high-polluting air conditions, which is precisely what should be highlighted. In this paper, a novel multiple kernel learning (MKL) model that embodies the characteristics of ensemble learning, kernel learning, and representative learning is proposed to forecast the near future air quality (AQ). The centered alignment approach is used for learning kernels, and a boosting approach is used to determine the proper number of kernels. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed MKL model, its performance is compared to that of classical autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model; widely used parametric models like random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM); popular neural network models like multiple layer perceptron (MLP); and long short-term memory neural network. Datasets acquired from a coastal city Hong Kong and an inland city Beijing are used to train and validate all the models. Experiments show that the MKL model outperforms the other models. Moreover, the MKL model has better forecast ability for high health risk category AQ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]