Abstract The state of health (SOH) of a battery is the main indicator of battery life. In order to improve the SOH estimation accuracy, a model framework for lithium-ion battery health state estimation with feature reconstruction and improved least squares support vector machine is proposed. First, the indirect health features (HF) are obtained by processing multiple health features extracted from the charging and discharging phases through principal component analysis to remove the information redundancy among multiple features. Subsequently, multiple smooth component subsequences of different frequencies are obtained by using variational modal decomposition to efficiently capture the overall downtrend and regeneration fluctuations of the data. Then, use the sparrow search algorithm to optimize the least squares support vector machine to build an estimation model, predict and superimpose the reconstructed fusion features of multiple feature subsequences. Finally, use the mapping relationship between the reconstructed HF and the SOH for the estimation. The NASA battery dataset and the University of Maryland battery dataset (CACLE) are used to perform validation tests on multiple batteries with different cycle intervals. The results show that the mean absolute error and root mean square error are less than 1% and the method has high-estimation accuracy and robustness.