Recurrence-Based Analyses

This book introduces techniques developed in physics and physiology for characterizing and analyzing patterns in time series data to a broad audience of social scientists. In contrast to time-series regression and related techniques, recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) has its background in chaos and nonlinear dynamical systems—theory arguably very relevant to social processes. The goal of Recurrence-Based Analyses is to introduce readers to these techniques that allow to characterize a system’s complexity, stability and instability, and conditions under which it transitions from one state to another. The authors illustrate concepts and techniques with relevant social science examples at different temporal scales: biweekly polling data on federal elections in Germany; daily values of three stock market indices; daily cases of SarsCov-19 in four countries during the pandemic; and second-by-second vocalizations of mothers and infants interacting recorded by motion cameras. This introduction to RQA serves as a useful supplement to undergraduate and graduate courses in computational social science, but its widest use is likely to be by practitioners who seek new tools to address social scientific questions in new ways.