Support vector machine(SVM) is capable of providing a more complete description of the linear and nonlinear relationships among random variables. In this paper we propose a sparse kernel regression(SKR) to overcome a weak point of SVM, which is, the steep growth of the number of support vectors with increasing the number of training data. The iterative reweighted least squares(IRWLS) procedure is used to solve the optimal problem of SKR with a Laplacian prior. Furthermore, the generalized cross validation(GCV) function is introduced to select the hyper-parameters which affect the performance of SKR. Experimental results are then presented which illustrate the performance of the proposed procedure.