Recurrence-Based Analyses

Sebastian Wallot and Giuseppe Leonardi introduce 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 can 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, and also by researchers who seek new tools to address social scientific questions in new ways.