Takagi-Sugeno-Kang fuzzy system fusion: A survey at hierarchical, wide and stacked levels

•We review the fundamental concepts related to TSK FS.•We investigate TSK FS fusion at hierarchical, wide and stacked levels.•We discuss time complexity, interpretability and performance of TSK FS fusion. With excellent global approximation performance and interpretability, Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy systems have enjoyed a wide range of applications in various fields, such as smart control, medical, and finance. However, in handling high-dimensional complex data, the performance and interpretability of a single TSK fuzzy system are easily degraded by rule explosion due to the curse of dimensionality. Ensemble learning comes into play to deal with the problem by the fusion of multiple TSK fuzzy systems using appropriate ensemble learning strategies, which has shown to be effective in eliminating the issue of the curse of dimensionality curse problem and reducing the number of fuzzy rules, thereby maintaining the interpretability of fuzzy systems. To this end, this paper gives a comprehensive survey of TSK fuzzy system fusion to provide insights into further research development. First, we briefly review the fundamental concepts related to TSK fuzzy systems, including fuzzy rule structures, training methods, and interpretability, and discuss the three different development directions of TSK fuzzy systems. Next, along the direction of TSK fuzzy system fusion, we investigate in detail the current ensemble strategies for fusion at hierarchical, wide and stacked levels, and discuss their differences, merits and weaknesses from the aspects of time complexity, interpretability (model complexity) and classification performance. We then present some applications of TSK fuzzy systems in real-world scenarios. Finally, the challenges and future directions of TSK fuzzy system fusion are discussed to foster prospective research.