This research was aimed to assess the potential of a radial basis function (RBF) approximation method against the dislocation substructure-based constitutive model in predicting high-temperature deformation behavior of the AA7020 aluminum alloy. Hot compression tests were performed over a range of strain rate of 0.1–100 s−1 and a range of temperature of 350–500 °C up to a strain of 0.6. The hot deformation behavior of the alloy was first described by a substructure kinetic-based constitutive equation, with the effects of strain, strain rate and temperature together with dynamic recovery parameters taken into consideration. A RBF approximation method was then developed to model the flow behavior of the material. The RBF model, as a kind of novel mesh-free function estimation approach, was trained and tested with the obtained datasets from the hot compression tests. The performance of the developed analytical and neural computational models was evaluated using statistical criteria. The results showed that the RBF model was more proficient and accurate in predicting the hot deformation behavior of this aluminum alloy than the substructure-based constitutive model.@en