StarIn: An Approach to Predict the Popularity of GitHub Repository

The popularity of repository in GitHub is an important indicator to evaluate its quality. Exploring the trend of popularity is a crucial guideline to study its development potential. Herein, StarIn, a stargazer-influence based approach is proposed to predict the popularity of GitHub repository. Using the followers in GitHub as a basic dataset, stargazer-following based network was established. The indicator, stargazer influence, was measured from three aspects of basic influence, network dynamic influence and network static influence. Experiments was conducted, and the correlation of StarIn was analyzed with the popularity of repository from the perspective of six characteristics. The experimental evaluation provides an interesting approach to predict the popularity of repositories in GitHub from a new perspective. StarIn achieves an excellent performance of predicting the popularity of repositories with a high accurate rate under two different classifiers.