Evaluation of selected recurrence measures in discriminating pre-ictal and inter-ictal periods from epileptic EEG data

•Recurrence-based analysis of brain dynamics in human epilepsy.•Comparison of recurrence quantification and recurrence network measures.•Statistically significant precursory structures in three out of five patients.•High congruence among measures in characterizing brain dynamics.

We investigate the suitability of selected measures of complexity based on recurrence quantification analysis and recurrence networks for an identification of pre-seizure states in multi-day, multi-channel, invasive electroencephalographic recordings from five epilepsy patients. We employ several statistical techniques to avoid spurious findings due to various influencing factors and due to multiple comparisons and observe precursory structures in three patients. Our findings indicate a high congruence among measures in identifying seizure precursors and emphasize the current notion of seizure generation in large-scale epileptic networks. A final judgment of the suitability for field studies, however, requires evaluation on a larger database.