Traditional PCA is a linear method, but most engineering problems are nonlinear. Using the linear PCA in nonlinear problems may bring distorted and misleading results. Therefore, an approach of nonlinear principal component analysis (NLPCA) using radial basis function (RBF) neural network is developed in this paper. The orthogonal least squares (OLS) algorithm is used to train the RBF neural network. This method improves the training speed and prevents it from being trapped in local optimization. Results of two experiments show that this NLPCA method can effectively capture nonlinear correlation of nonlinear complex data, and improve the precision of the classification and the prediction.