A method and apparatus for automatic detection of trends (and epidemics) among cases faced by a customer or patient support organization, based on automated classification of the logs of those cases in a topic hierarchy. The method includes establishing an item topic hierarchy of desired granularity and applying that hierarchy to a selected group of items, automatically classifying new items to at least one topic in the hierarchy, establishing windows having sequential sets of items based upon selected temporal parameters, determining item distributions over respective windows, and comparing respective item distributions in at least two such windows.