Measure of intermittency/continuousness of a signal I have three signals (below) each having the same standard deviation, however, are clearly very different temporally.



Is there some such metric that could be calculated for each of these signals to give an indication of how they vary over time, such as a measure of continuousness or intermittency if such a metric exists.

If possible, I would like to do this by calculating a single number for each of these signals, rather than windowing into smaller chunks.

Thanks
Any metric measuring the relative importance of high-frequency content vs low-frequency content will be correlated with the amount of abrupt changes in the signal.

You can try spectral roll-off (the frequency under which x% of the energy is concentrated) or spectral centroid.