Summary: Breathing motion complicates many image-guided interventions working on the thorax or upper abdomen. However, prior knowledge provided by a statistical breathing model, can reduce the uncertainties of organ location. In this paper, a prediction framework for statistical motion modeling is presented and different representations of the dynamic data for motion model building of the lungs are investigated. Evaluation carried out on 4D-CT data sets of 10 patients showed that a displacement vector-based representation can reduce most of the respiratory motion with a prediction error of about 2 mm, when assuming the diaphragm motion to be known.