To make up the poor quality defects of traditional control methods and meet the growing requirements of accuracy for strip crown, an optimized model based on support vector machine (SVM) is put forward firstly to enhance the quality of product in hot strip rolling. Meanwhile, for enriching data information and ensuring data quality, experimental data were collected from a hot-rolled plant to set up prediction models, as well as the prediction performance of models was evaluated by calculating multiple indicators. Furthermore, the traditional SVM model and the combined prediction models with particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and the principal component analysis combined with cuckoo search (PCA-CS) optimization strategies are presented to make a comparison. Besides, the prediction performance comparisons of the three models are discussed. Finally, the experimental results revealed that the PCA-CS-SVM model has the highest prediction accuracy and the fastest convergence speed. Furthermore, the root mean squared error (RMSE) of PCA-CS-SVM model is 2.04 µm, and 98.15% of prediction data have an absolute error of less than 4.5 μm. Especially, the results also proved that PCA-CS-SVM model not only satisfies precision requirement but also has certain guiding significance for the actual production of hot strip rolling.