In order to improve the accuracy of tool wear prediction, an attention-based composite neural network, referred to as the ConvLSTM-Att model (1DCNN-LSTM-Attention), is proposed. Firstly, local multidimensional feature vectors are extracted with the help of a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN), which avoids the loss of wear features caused by manual feature extraction. Then the temporal relationship learning between multidimensional feature vectors is performed by introducing a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to make up for the lack of long-short distance dependence of the captured sequence of the CNN network. Finally, an attention mechanism is applied to strengthen the ability to extract key information from tool-wearing temporal features. The proposed ConvLSTM-Att model is trained with the measured tool wear data and then performs as a tool wear predictor. The model is compared with several state-of-the-art models on the PHM tool wear data sets. It significantly outperforms the other models in terms of prediction accuracy, but with similar computational complexity.