Due to the complex changes in physicochemical properties of lithium-ion batteries during the process from degradation to failure, it is difficult for methods based on physical or data-driven models to fully characterize this nonlinear process, and existing methods that hybridize physical and data-driven models suffer from ambiguous hybridization, which results in the vast majority of existing methods for predicting the RUL of lithium-ion batteries suffering from a lack of accuracy and robustness. In this study, a novel hybrid approach based on empirical modeling and data-driven techniques is proposed for predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of lithium-ion batteries. To better capture its complexity, stochasticity, and state transition, and improve the modeling accuracy and RUL prediction precision, Gamma stochasticity and state-space modeling are used to empirically model the complex Li-ion battery degradation process. Moreover, the expectation maximization (EM) method of particle filtering (PF) was used to estimate the hidden parameters of the empirical model, and the estimated parameters were corrected using an optimized support vector regression (SVR) method to enhance the generalization performance and robustness of the data-driven model. The results show that the gamma state-space model is effective in capturing the inherent stochastic properties of the battery degradation and the proposed hybrid method outperforms the existing prediction methods in RUL prediction. The experiments show that the Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA) optimized SVR is considered to be the most effective correction method for the estimated parameters, while the new EM-PF-SSA-SVR hybrid method provides better performance for state assessment and RUL prediction of lithium-ion batteries. It is indicated that the proposed EM-PF-SSA-SVR method with Gamma stochastic process has hybrid validity and superior performance with equal performance and less parameter computation relative to the existing state-of-the-art deep learning RUL prediction methods.