We define a family $\mathcal {B}(t)$ of compact subsets of the unit interval which provides a filtration of the set of numbers whose continued fraction expansion has bounded digits. We study how the set $\mathcal {B}(t)$ changes as the parameter t ranges in $[0,1]$ , and see that the family undergoes period-doubling bifurcations and displays the same transition pattern from periodic to chaotic behaviour as the family of real quadratic polynomials. The set $\mathcal {E}$ of bifurcation parameters is a fractal set of measure zero and Hausdorff dimension $1$ . The Hausdorff dimension of $\mathcal {B}(t)$ varies continuously with the parameter, and we show that the dimension of each individual set equals the dimension of the corresponding section of the bifurcation set $\mathcal {E}$ .

We consider for each $t$ the set $K(t)$ of points of the circle whose forward orbit for the doubling map does not intersect $(0,t)$, and look at the dimension function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}(t):=\text{H.dim}\,K(t)$. We prove that at every bifurcation parameter $t$, the local Hölder exponent of the dimension function equals the value of the function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}(t)$ itself. A similar statement holds for general expanding maps of the circle: namely, we consider the topological entropy of the map restricted to the survival set, and obtain bounds on its local Hölder exponent in terms of the value of the function.

We construct a countable family of open intervals contained in (0,1] whose endpoints are quadratic surds and such that their union is a full measure set. We then show that these intervals are precisely the monotonicity intervals of the entropy of α-continued fractions, thus proving a conjecture of Nakada and Natsui.