Abstract A novel method for nonlinear time-varying systems identification based on multi-dimensional Taylor network and variable forgetting factor recursive least squares algorithm is proposed. In this paper, the connection weight coefficients of multi-dimensional Taylor network are regarded as time-varying parameters, which are trained by the variable forgetting factor recursive least squares algorithm, to reflect the input-output change of nonlinear time-varying systems. Simulation results show that the method proposed in this paper is valid.