Github Repo Recommendation:Topic Model meets Code

Task

Item recommendation

Overview

Github is a social network site for programmers, where they can host source code repositories (also called repos). Users can watch repos they are interested in; when a user is watching a repo, s/he will receive status updates on its activities (such as commits, tagging, etc…).

In 2009, Github hosted a recommendation contest, where the objective was to recommend repositories to users. The dataset contained 56K users, 120K repositories, and 440K user-watches-repo relationships between them.

Collaborative filtering typically uses some form of matrix factorization technique, and ignores content (in this case, the repos/code). Alternatively, in this project, we propose to incorporate inherent topics of the source code (of repos) to improve predictions.

Team

Naoki Orii

Datasets

• The dataset from the Github contest is available at https://github.s3.amazonaws.com/data/download.zip

Baseline Method

A collaborative-filtering based method, such as SVD

Challenges

• As it may be expensive to perform topic modeling on 120K repos, we may perform prediction on a subset of this data

More info about the Github contest

More information about the Github contest is available below:

• https://github.com/blog/466-the-2009-github-contest
• https://github.com/blog/481-about-the-github-contest

Related Work

Using topic models to improve collaborative filtering has been investigated in the following paper:

• C Wang and D Blei, "Collaborative Topic Modeling for Recommending Scientific Articles", in KDD 2011

The following papers describe applying topic models to code:

• E Linstead, P Rigor, S Bajracharya, C Lopes, and P Baldi, "Mining concepts from code with probabilistic topic models", ASE '07 Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
• K Tian, M Revelle, and D Poshyvanyk, "Using latent dirichlet allocation for automatic categorization of software", MSR '09 Proceedings of the 2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories