Liverani C., Saussol B., Vaienti S. A probabilistic approach to intermittency (38K, AMS-TeX 2.1) ABSTRACT. We present an original approach which allows to investigate the statistical properties of a non-uniform hyperbolic map of the interval. Based on a stochastic approximation of the deterministic map, this method gives essentially the optimal polynomial bound for the decay of correlations, the degree depending on the order of the tangency at the neutral fixed point.