The aim of the research work is to predict the material removal rate of a work-piece in electrical discharge machining (EDM). Here, an effort has been made to predict the material removal rate through back-propagation neural network (BPN) and radial basis function neural network (RBFN) for a work-piece of AISI D2 steel. The input parameters for the architecture are discharge-current (Ip), pulse-duration (Ton), and duty-cycle (τ) taken for consideration to obtained the output for material removal rate of the work-piece. In the architecture, it has been observed that radial basis function neural network is comparatively faster than back-propagation neural network but logically back-propagation neural network results more real value. Therefore BPN may consider as a better process in this architecture for consistent prediction to save time and money for conducting experiments. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.