Rapid depletion of fossil fuel and continuous increase in gasoline prices have stimulated the search of alternative fuels. This paper deals with the prediction of engine performance, emission and combustion characteristics of compression ignition engine fuelled with fish oil biodiesel using artificial neural network (ANN). Experimental investigations are carried out in a single cylinder constant speed direct injection diesel engine under variable load conditions at different injection timings−210, 240 and 270 bTDC. The performance, combustion and emission characteristics are measured using an exhaust gas analyser, smoke meter, piezoelectric pressure transducer and crank angle encoder for different fuel blends and engine load conditions. For training the neural network, feed-forward back propagation algorithm is used. The developed ANN model predicts the performance, combustions and exhaust emissions with a correlation coefficients (R) of 0.97–0.99 and a mean relative error of 0.62–4.826%. The root mean square errors are found to be low. The developed model has found to predict accurately the engine performance, combustion and emission parameters at different injection timings. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.