  Recurrence plot based time series analysis is widely used to study changes
and transitions in the dynamics of a system or temporal deviations from its
overall dynamical regime. However, most studies do not discuss the significance
of the detected variations in the recurrence quantification measures. In this
letter we propose a novel method to add a confidence measure to the recurrence
quantification analysis. We show how this approach can be used to study
significant changes in dynamical systems due to a change in control parameters,
chaos-order as well as chaos-chaos transitions. Finally we study and discuss
climate transitions by analysing a marine proxy record for past sea surface
temperature. This paper is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the
introduction of recurrence plots.
