On the suitability of hugging face hub for empirical studies

Adem Ait, Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo, Jordi Cabot

Abstract: Empirical studies in software engineering mainly rely on the data available on code-hosting platforms, being GitHub the most representative. Nevertheless, in the last years, the emergence of Machine Learning (ML) has led to the development of platforms specifically designed for hosting ML-based projects, with Hugging Face Hub (HFH) as the most popular one. So far, there have been no studies evaluating the potential of HFH for such studies.