An improved nonlinear adaptive switching controlmethod is presented to relax the assumption on the higher order nonlinear terms of a class of discrete-time non-affine nonlinear systems. The proposed control strategy is composed of a linear adaptive controller, a neural network (NN) based nonlinear adaptive controller and a switching mechanism. An incremental model is derived to represent the considered system and an improved robust adaptive law is chosen to update the parameters of the linear adaptive controller. A new performance criterion of the switching mechanism is designed to select the proper controller. Using this control scheme, all the signals in the system are proved to be bounded. Numerical examples verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. (C) 2016 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.