This paper developed an artificial neural network (ANN) based method for the prediction of the yield performance of rectangular RC columns. In this method, the inputs of ANN were determined on the basis of the empirical studies of the impact factors of the yield performance of RC columns. The sensitivity analysis of the yield performance of RC columns was also investigated to validate the reasonability of the inputs selection of ANN. In order to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, the ANN models were applied to predict the yield performance of rectangular RC columns by using 210 sets of experiment data provided by PEER, Furthermore, the predicted results were compared with empirical model results. Comparative analysis has shown that the prediction degree of agreement with the experiment results of ANN models is much better than that of other empirical prediction models. Also, the result reveals that the proposed method provides a new way for accurately estimating structural performance under earthquake with data scarcity.