Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a novel and simple prediction model of long-term metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) gas sensor baseline, and it brings some new perspectives for sensor drift. MOS gas sensors, which play a very important role in electronic nose (e-nose), constantly change with the fluctuation of environmental temperature and humidity (i.e. drift). Therefore, it is very meaningful to realize the long-term time series estimation of sensor signal for drift compensation. Design/methodology/approach - In the proposed sensor baseline drift prediction model, auto-regressive moving average (ARMA) and Kalman filter models are used. The basic idea is to build the ARMA and Kalman models on the short-term sensor signal collected in a short period (one month) by an e-nose and aim at realizing the long-term time series prediction in a year using the obtained model. Findings - Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach based on ARMA and Kalman filter is very effective in time series prediction of sensor baseline signal in e-nose. Originality/value - Though ARMA and Kalman filter are well-known models in signal processing, this paper, at the first time, brings a new perspective for sensor drift prediction problem based on the two typical models.