INTRODUCTION: Diabetic nephropathy is one of the complications of diabetes that causes damage to kidneys. Deep learning techniques are widely used to predict different diseases.OBJECTIVES: The main aim of this work is to develop an effective prediction model using deep learning. To get an effective model, a suitable dataset is considered that comprises of features related to diabetic nephropathy.METHODS: Deep belief network (DBN) is the proposed deep learning technique which is compared with naive bayes, CART decision tree, logistic regression and support vector machine. DBN is composed of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). The algorithms are analysed based on evaluation measures like area under PR curve, area under ROC curve, gini coefficient and jaccard index.RESULTS: After comparison of all algorithms, it was observed that DBN has performed better in terms of AUROC, gini coefficient and jaccard index with values 0.8203, 0.6406 and 0.7777 respectively. But CART obtained better value of 0.9039 only for AUPR.CONCLUSION: The proposed technique has outperformed other techniques in terms of three metrics and is identified as the best performing algorithm. Hence, it is suggested to use DBN while predicting diabetic nephropathy.