Research of thermal characteristics has been a key issue in the development of high-speed feed system. Most of the work carried out thus far is based on the principle of directly mapping the thermal error against the temperature of critical machine elements irrespective of the operating conditions. But recent researches show that different sets of operating parameters generated significantly different error values even though the temperature of the machine elements generated was similar. As such, it is important to develop a generic thermal error model which is capable of evaluating the positioning error induced by different operating parameters. This paper ultimately aims at the development of a comprehensive prediction model that can predict the thermal characteristics under different operating conditions (feeding speed, load and preload of ballscrew) in a feed system. A novel wavelet neural network based on feedback linearization autoregressive moving averaging (NARMA-L2) model is introduced to predict the temperature rise of sensitive points and thermal positioning errors considering the different operating conditions as the model inputs. Particle swarm optimization(PSO)algorithm is brought in as the training method. According to ISO230-2 Positioning Accuracy Measurement and ISO230-3 Thermal Effect Evaluation standards, experiments under different operating conditions were carried out on a self-made quasi high-speed feed system experimental bench HUST-FS-001 by using Ptl00 as temperature sensor, and the positioning errors were measured by Heidenhain linear grating scale. The experiment results show that the recommended method can be used to predict temperature rise of sensitive points and thermal positioning errors with good accuracy. The work described in this paper lays a solid foundation of thermal error prediction and compensation in a feed system based on varying operating conditions and machine tool characteristics.