The automatic seizure detection is significant for epilepsy diagnosis and it can alleviate the work intensity of inspecting prolonged electroencephalogram (EEG). This paper presents and investigates a novel machine learning approach utilizing gradient boosting to detect seizures from long-term EEG. We apply relative fluctuation index to extract features of long-term intracranial EEG data. A classifier trained with the gradient boosting algorithm is adopted to discriminate the seizure and non-seizure EEG signals. Smoothing and collar technique are finally used as post-processing in order to improve the detection accuracy further. The seizure detection method is assessed on Freiburg EEG datasets from 21 patients. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method yields an average sensitivity of 94. 60% with a false detection rate of 0. 18/h.