Estimating energy expenditure is essential in monitoring the intensity of physical activity and health status. Energy expenditure can be estimated based on wearable sensors such as inertial measurement unit (IMU). While a variety of methods have been developed to estimate energy expenditure during day-to-day activities, their performances have not been thoroughly evaluated under walking conditions according to various speeds and inclines. This study investigated IMU-based neural network models for energy expenditure estimation under various walking conditions and comparatively analyzed their performances in terms of sensor attachment locations and training/testing datasets. In this study, two neural network models were selected based on a previous study (Slade et al., 2019): (M1) a multilayer perceptron using sensor signals during each gait cycle, and (M2) a recurrent neural network using sensor signal sequences of a fixed window size. The results revealed the following: (i) the performance of the foot attachment model was the best among the five sensor attachment locations (0.89 W/kg for M1 and 1.14 W/kg for M2); and (ii) although the performance of M1 was superior to that of M2, M1 requires accurate gait detection for data segmentation by each stride, which hinders the usefulness of M2.