In this paper, we have developed an ellipsoid radial basis function neural network (ERBFNN) and algorithm for sparse representing of a molecular shape. To evaluate a sparse representation of the molecular shape model, the Gaussian density map of molecule is approximated by ERBFNN with a relatively small number of neurons. The deep learning models were trained by optimizing a nonlinear loss function with L 1 regularization. Experimental results demonstrate that the original molecular shape is able to be represented with good accuracy by much fewer scale of ERBFNN by our algorithm. And our network in principle can be applied to multi-resolution sparse representation of molecular shape and coarse-grained molecular modeling.