SUMMARYThis paper is concerned with the application of radial basis function networks (RBFNs) for numerical solution of high order ordinary differential equations (ODEs).Two unsymmetric RBF collocation schemes, namely the usual direct approach based on a differentiation process and the proposed indirect approach based on an integration process, are developed to solve high order ODEs directly and the latter is found to be considerably superior to the former. Good accuracy and high rate of convergence are obtained with the proposed indirect method.