Global radiation is not a regularly measured parameter in any weather station relative to other mete-orological parameters due to measurement costs. This study has proposed hybrid artificial neural network models that predicted monthly radiation using typical weather and geographic data. Two datasets and six artificial neural network models were respectively built for indigenous and widespread regions around the world. The referred models co-optimized the artificial neural network properties and feature selection. For this purpose, an adaptive evolutionary algorithm improving prediction perfor-mance was developed to train the neural networks. This novel approach has yielded promising results compared to the developed deep learning models in this study. The results revealed that while the indigenous models had common features of longitude, sunshine durations, precipitation, and wind speed, the widespread models involved those of latitude, sunshine durations, and mean daily maximum air temperature. The proposed hybrid model had respectively the best mean absolute percentage errors of 2.45% and 9.93% for validation dataset and 3.75% and 11.03% for testing dataset of the indigenous and widespread regions, respectively. The present findings showed that the proposed hybrid model could be evaluated as a generic model and could improve the forecasting accuracy with the specified optimization parameters. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.