Under the background of global warming and the energy crisis, the Chinese government has set the goal of carbon peaking and carbon neutralization. With the rapid development of machine learning, some advanced machine learning algorithms have also been applied to the control and prediction of carbon emissions due to their high efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, the current situation of machine learning applied to carbon emission prediction is studied in detail by means of paper retrieval. It was found that machine learning has become a hot topic in the field of carbon emission prediction models, and the main carbon emission prediction models are mainly based on back propagation neural networks, support vector machines, long short-term memory neural networks, random forests and extreme learning machines. By describing the characteristics of these five types of carbon emission prediction models and conducting a comparative analysis, we determined the applicable characteristics of each model, and based on this, future research ideas for carbon emission prediction models based on machine learning are proposed.