This letter reports a study of a hybrid burst assembly and a hybrid burst loss recovery scheme (delay-based burst assembly and hybrid loss recovery (DBAHLR)) which selectively employs proactive or reactive loss recovery techniques depending on the classification of traffic into short term and long term, respectively. Traffic prediction and segregation of optical burst switching network flows into the long term and short term are conducted based on predicted link holding times using the hidden Markov model (HMM). The hybrid burst assembly implemented in DBAHLR uses a consecutive average-based burst assembly to handle jitter reduction necessary in real-time applications, with variations in burst sizes due to the non-monotonic nature of the average delay handled by additional burst length thresholding. This dynamic hybrid approach based on HMM prediction provides overall a lower blocking probability and delay and more throughput when compared with forward segment redundancy mechanism or purely HMM prediction-based adaptive burst sizing and wavelength allocation (HMM-TP).