The accurate and reliable real‐time prediction of melt index (MI) is indispensable in quality control of the industrial propylene polymerization (PP) processes. This paper presents a real‐time soft sensor based on optimized least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) for MI prediction. First, the hybrid continuous ant colony differential evolution algorithm (HACDE) is proposed to optimize the parameters of LSSVM. Then, considering the complexity and nondeterminacy of PP plant, an online correcting strategy (OCS) is adopted to update the modeling data and to revise the model's parameters adaptively. Thus, the real‐time prediction model, HACDE‐OCS‐LSSVM, is obtained. Based on the data from a real PP plant, the models of HACDE‐LSSVM, DE‐LSSVM and LSSVM are also developed for comparison. The research results show that the proposed real‐time model achieves a good performance in the practical industrial MI prediction process. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.