You Win Some You Ransom: Reconstructing the ransomware ecosystem using ground truth communication data of the Conti ransomware gang

Ransomware has evolved over the years, shifting from widespread attacks targeting individuals to focused attacks on businesses and agencies. These attacks are performed by ransomware gangs while establishing interaction within the ransomware ecosystem. In this thesis, the ransomware ecosystem is posited as being constructed of three separate sub...

A Systematic Comparison of Search-Based Approaches for LDA Hyperparameter Tuning

Context: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) has been successfully used in the literature to extract topics from software documents and support developers in various software engineering tasks. While LDA has been mostly used with default settings, previous studies showed that default hyperparameter values generate sub-optimal topics from software...

Latent Dirichlet Allocation: Explained and improved upon for applications in marketing intelligence

In today's digital world, customers give their opinions on a product that they have purchased online in the form of reviews. The industry is interested in these reviews, and wants to know about which topics their clients write, such that the producers can improve products on specific aspects. Topic models can extract the main topics from large...

A Systematic Comparison of Search Algorithms for Topic Modelling—A Study on Duplicate Bug Report Identification

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) has been used to support many software engineering tasks. Previous studies showed that default settings lead to sub-optimal topic modeling with a dramatic impact on the performance of such approaches in terms of precision and recall. For this reason, researchers used search algorithms (e.g., genetic...