A support vector machine (SVM) based multiuser detection (MUD) scheme in code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system is proposed. In this scheme, the equivalent support vector (SV) is obtained through a kernel sparsity approximation algorithm, which avoids the conventional costly quadratic programming (QP) procedure in SVM. Besides, the coefficient of the SV is attained through the solution to a generalized eigenproblem. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has almost the same bit error rate (BER) as the standard SVM and is better than minimum mean square error (MMSE) scheme. Meanwhile, it has a low computation complexity.