The particle degradation problem of particle filter (PF) algorithm caused by reduction of particle weights significantly influences the positioning accuracy of target nodes in wireless sensor networks. This study presents a predictor to obtain the particle swarm of high quality by calculating non-linear variations of ranging between particles and flags and modifying the reference distribution function. To this end, probability variations of distances between particles and star flags are calculated and the maximum inclusive distance using the maximum probability of high-quality particle swarm is obtained. The quality of particles is valued by the Euclidean distance between the predicted and real observations, and hereafter particles of high quality are contained in spherical coordinate system using the distance as diameter. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is robust and the computational complexity is low. The method can effectively improve the positioning accuracy and reduce the positioning error of target nodes.