Evolutionary ensemble learning integrates advantages of ensemble learning and evolutionary algorithm and is widely used in machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition.Firstly, the theoretical basis, formation, and taxonomy are introduced.Secondly, according to the optimization task of evolutionary algorithm in ensemble learning, some representative researches on evolutionary ensemble learning field were analysed from the aspects of instance selection, feature selection, parameter optimization, structure optimization, and fusion strategy optimization, and the characteristics of different evolutionary ensemble learning methods were summarized.Finally, the pros and cons of the current researches on evolutionary ensemble learning were analysed, and research directions in the future work were given.