Abstract This article discusses the significance and obstacles of short-term power prediction in photovoltaic systems and introduces a hybrid model for photovoltaic short-term power prediction technology based on variational mode decomposition (VMD), convolutional neural network (CNN), improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) and least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). In the initial stage, the photovoltaic generation signal is decomposed into multiple Intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using VMD to enhance the extraction of signal time–frequency characteristics. Subsequently, CNN is utilized for feature learning and extraction of each IMF, modeling the nonlinear and non-stationary features. Following this, the IPSO-LSSVM optimization algorithm is employed to establish and optimize multiple LSSVM models, predicting power fluctuations at different time scales. Finally, the predictions from each model are synthesized to obtain the final photovoltaic short-term power forecast. Through validation with actual photovoltaic generation data, this hybrid model demonstrates high accuracy and reliability in short-term power prediction, showing an average relative error and root mean square error reduction of 15.23 and 53.60%, respectively, compared to a certain comparative model. This proposed method based on VMD-CNN-IPSO-LSSVM hybrid model for photovoltaic power prediction holds promising prospects and practical value in the operation and scheduling of photovoltaic generation systems.