In biosignal analysis, the utility of artificial neural networks (ANN) in classifying electromyographic (EMG) data trained with the momentum back propagation algorithm has recently been demonstrated. In the current study, the self-organizing feature map algorithm, the genetics-based machine learning (GBML) paradigm, and the K-means nearest neighbour clustering algorithm are applied on the same set of data. The aim of this exercise is to show how these three paradigms can be used in practice, given that their diagnostic performance is problem- and parameter-dependent. A total of 720 macro EMG recordings were carried out from four groups, from seven normal, nine motor neuron disease, 14 Becker's muscular dystrophy, and six spinal muscular atrophy subjects, respectively. Twenty-three of the subjects were used for training and 13 for evaluating the various models. For each subject, the mean and the standard deviation of the parameters (i) amplitude, (ii) area, (iii) average power and (iv) duration were extracted. The feature vector was structured in two different ways for input to the models: an eight-input feature vector that consisted of both the mean and the standard deviation of the four parameters measured, and a four-input feature vector that included only the mean of the parameters. Also, due to the heterogenous nature of the spinal muscular atrophy group, three class models that excluded this group were investigated. In general, self-organizing feature map and GBML models resulted in comparable diagnostic performance of the order of 80-90% correct classifications (CCs) score for the evaluation set, whereas the K-means nearest neighbour algorithm models gave lower percentage CCs. Furthermore, for all three learning paradigms: better diagnostic performance was obtained for the three class models compared with the four class models; similar diagnostic performance was obtained for both the eight- and four-input feature vectors. Finally, it is claimed that the proposed methodology followed in this work can be applied for the development of diagnostic systems in the analysis of biosignals.