To improve the navigation performance of the navigation system combining inertial navigation system (INS) and global positioning system (GPS) under complicated environments, especially GPS outages, a navigation method -wavelet neural network based on random forest regression (RFR-WNN) to assist adaptive Kalman filter (AKF) -is proposed. AKF is employed to correct INS errors, the Kalman filter is improved by introducing adaptive factor, to suppress the influence of the complex environment and random errors on the filtering accuracy; RFR-WNN is used to construct a high-precision prediction model when GPS works well, and to provide the required observations for AKF update when GPS outages. To solve the problem that the single neural network structure is easy to cause the overfitting, unstable and low prediction accuracy due to the lack of comprehensive training samples, RFR is introduced to optimize the single WNN, which can improve the generalization ability and prediction accuracy. In order to verify the effectiveness and advancement of the proposed method, vehicle navigation experiments were carried out, the results indicate that the proposed method has better navigation accuracy and performance than compared methods during GPS outages, and this advantage is more obvious in the case that fewer samples are collected.INDEX TERMS Navigation technology, integrated navigation, wavelet neural network, adaptive Kalman filter, GPS outages, random forest regression.