Burst Detection (Kleinberg) for Emerging Topics

Kleinberg burst detection identifies periods during which a feature in a document stream — a keyword, a phrase, or citations to a particular paper — suddenly surges in frequency, signaling an emerging topic or a moment of intense attention. Introduced by Jon Kleinberg in 2003 to find bursty structure in streams such as email and news, the algorithm models the arrival of events with an infinite-state automaton in which higher states correspond to faster emission rates. A burst is detected when the optimal explanation of the stream requires moving into a high-rate state, with a built-in cost that discourages spurious switching. In scientometrics the method has become a standard way to detect rising research terms and 'citation bursts' — papers or topics whose citation rate spikes — making sudden growth in the literature visible and datable.