Evaluation of Posts by Bioinformatics Code Developers on Stack Overflow Platform: Topic Modeling and Community Detection

Abstract

Developers are key to managing, storing and analysing the growing biological data. Platforms like Stack Overflow help identify current trends in the field. In this study, we present an analysis of the posts shared on the Stack Overflow website within the field of bioinformatics. We analyzed the posts shared about bioinformatics on the Stack Overflow platform using LDA topic modeling and the Louvain community finding algorithm. Our finding revealed that bioinformatics developers' questions focused on 28 top in four main categories. We found that the most popular topics were "Gene Expression and Function", "Protein Interaction Prediction", "Gene and Protein Structure Analysis", "Sample Analysis in Network Problems", and "Genomic Data Management". Besides, we also presented that topics in bioinformatics consist of seven communities and the trends of these communities and relationship between the 100 most central words. Our finding also revealed that the topics that code developers are most interested in in the field of bioinformatics are "next generation sequencing", "genome", "gene", "phylogeny", "proteins", and "sequence". Based on the results we obtained from this study, the problems that bioinformatics developers have encountered over time have been revealed with topic modeling and community detection.