The Role of Data Filtering in Open Source Software Ranking and Selection
Addi Malviya Thakur, Audris Mockus · 2024
Faced with more than 100M open source projects, a more manageable small subset is needed for most empirical investigations. More than half of the research papers in leading venues investigated filtering projects by some measure of popularity with explicit or implicit arguments that unpopular projects are not of interest, may not even represent "real" software projects, or that less popular projects are not worthy of study. However, such filtering may have enormous effects on the results of the studies if and precisely because the sought-out response or prediction is in any way related to the filtering criteria.