Dependence of intermittency scaling on threshold in chaotic systems

Numerical and experimental investigations of intermittency in chaotic systems often lead to claims of universal classes based on the scaling of the average length of the laminar phase with parameter variation. We demonstrate that the scaling in general depends on the choice of the threshold used to define a proper laminar region in the phase space. For sufficiently large values of the threshold, the scaling exponent tends to converge but significant fluctuations can occur particularly for continuous-time systems. Insights into the dependence can be obtained using the idea of Poincaré recurrence.