Modeling light olefin production was one of the main concerns in chemical engineering field. In this paper, machine learning model based on artificial neural networks (ANN) was established to describe the effects of temperature and catalyst on ethylene and propene formation in n-pentane cracking. The establishment procedure included data pretreatment, model design, training process and testing process, and the mean square error (MSE) and regression coefficient (R-2) indexes were employed to evaluate model performance. It was found that the learning algorithm and ANN topology affected the calculation accuracy. GD24223. CGB2423, and LM24223 models were established by optimally matching the learning algorithm with ANN topology, and achieved excellent calculation accuracy. Furthermore, the stability of GD24223, CGB2423 and LM24223 models was investigated by gradually decreasing training data and simultaneously transforming data distribution. Compared with GD24223 and LM24223 models, CGB2423 model was more stable against the variations of training data, and the MSE values were always maintained at the magnitude of 10(-3)-10(-4), confirming its applicability for simulating light olefin production in n-pentane cracking. (C) 2020 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.