Traditional empirical correlations and models have found insufficient to predict the flooding velocity accurately mainly because there are many kinds of random packings which exhibit different characteristics. In this work, a novel data-driven modeling method, i.e. ensemble least squares support vector regression (ELSSVR), is proposed to construct a unified correlation for prediction of the flooding velocity for packed towers with random packings. The flooding data are first clustered into several classes by the fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm. Then, several single LSSVR models can be trained using each sub-class of samples to capture the special characteristics. Moreover, a weighted least squares approach is adopted to integrate these single LSSVR models. Consequently, the ELSSVR model can extract the feature information of flooding data effectively and improve the prediction performance. The proposed ELSSVR method is applied to construct a unified correlation for prediction of the flooding velocity in randomly packed towers. The obtained results for several kinds of random packings demonstrate that the ELSSVR-based correlation can obtain better prediction performance, compared with the traditional semi-empirical correlations and artificial neural networks-based models. Finally, a database containing the modeling information of flooding velocity in randomly packed towers of China is provided for academic research.