What do developers know about machine learning: A study of ML discussions on stackoverflow

Abdul Ali Bangash, Hareem Sahar, Shaiful Chowdhury, Alexander William Wong, Abram Hindle, Karim Ali

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Machine learning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence, is now popular in software engineering community and is successfully used for problems like bug prediction, and software development effort estimation. Developers' understanding of machine learning, however, is not clear, and we require investigation to understand what educators should focus on, and how different online programming discussion communities can be more helpful. We conduct a study on Stack Overflow (SO) machine learning related posts using the SOTorrent dataset. We found that some machine learning topics are significantly more discussed than others, and others need more attention. We also found that topic generation with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) can suggest more appropriate tags that can make a machine learning post more visible and thus can help in receiving immediate feedback from sites like SO.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages260-264
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781728134123
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2019
Event16th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: May 26 2019May 27 2019

Publication series

NameIEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Volume2019-May
ISSN (Print)2160-1852
ISSN (Electronic)2160-1860

Conference

Conference16th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period5/26/195/27/19

Keywords

  • Machine learning
  • Stackoverflow
  • Topic modeling

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

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