Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Fall 2019
Thesis Full Proposal: “Profiling Stack Overflow users based on badge collection”
Alexei Tipenko
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ABSTRACT
Stack Overflow is undoubtedly the most popular Q/A platform for software developers. Because of its status within the tech community, the platform contains a lot of interesting and relevant information that can be used within the field of mining software repositories. A lot of pertinent analysis has been done with the help of some Stack Overflow public datasets, yielding research topics relating to expert recommendation, sentiment analysis, reputation building and user post analysis. But there is one promising area of research that can be further expanded on – Badges. Badges represent a variety of engagement activities on the platform such as creating posts, answering questions, making comments, flagging, voting and editing. The broad scope of this data can highlight important measures of user participation that are more varied than a reputation score alone. By looking at important statistics around badges collected, a number of clustering methods can be used to group users by their badge achievements. Exploratory data analysis and the user clusters can help us understand who the users are, how the tend to behave on the platform and what improvements can be made to encourage more user activity.