An Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is an optical access network that allows a higher data rate with low power consumption. To improve energy savings for an EPON, the sleep and doze modes for the optical network units (ONUs) play a pivotal role. Many prediction schemes have been proposed to control these modes. To increase the prediction accuracy, this study proposes an energy-efficient approach that uses a support vector regression (SVR) model. A dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) scheme called SVR-DBA is designed to allocate bandwidth to ONUs more efficiently and fairly. To determine the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, simulations are performed. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme decreases energy consumption for ONUs by up to 47% and fulfills the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements in terms of delay, jitter, and packet loss.