  The advancement of science as outlined by Popper and Kuhn is largely
qualitative, but with bibliometric data it is possible and desirable to develop
a quantitative picture of scientific progress. Furthermore it is also important
to allocate finite resources to research topics that have growth potential, to
accelerate the process from scientific breakthroughs to technological
innovations. In this paper, we address this problem of quantitative knowledge
evolution by analysing the APS publication data set from 1981 to 2010. We build
the bibliographic coupling and co-citation networks, use the Louvain method to
detect topical clusters (TCs) in each year, measure the similarity of TCs in
consecutive years, and visualize the results as alluvial diagrams. Having the
predictive features describing a given TC and its known evolution in the next
year, we can train a machine learning model to predict future changes of TCs,
i.e., their continuing, dissolving, merging and splitting. We found the number
of papers from certain journals, the degree, closeness, and betweenness to be
the most predictive features. Additionally, betweenness increases significantly
for merging events, and decreases significantly for splitting events. Our
results represent a first step from a descriptive understanding of the Science
of Science (SciSci), towards one that is ultimately prescriptive.
