Detection of the type of intermittency using characteristic patterns in recurrence plots

One of the common routes to chaos is intermittency. Identification of the intermittency type is usually made using the properties of the probability distribution of laminar phases and of the average length of the laminar phases. Both have a statistical character and to obtain them a long time series has to be examined. Here, we present a recurrence plot method applicable to the analysis of short time series and through which the type of intermittency may be identified. The three types of intermittency introduced by Pomeau and Manneville and a chaos-chaos intermittency induced by interior crisis were examined. The identification of the type of intermittency is equivalent to the identification of the bifurcation associated with it. Our result seems particularly interesting as our method allows the analysis of short time series. The effect of the measurement noise on the effectiveness of the method is also discussed. An application of the method to the detection of type I intermittency in measured heart rate variability data is discussed.