Exploring the social influence of Kaggle virtual community on the M5 competition

One of the most significant differences of M5 over previous forecasting competitions is that it was held on Kaggle, an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. On the Kaggle platform, people can form virtual communities such as online notebooks and discussions to discuss their models, choice of features, loss functions, etc. This paper aims to study the social influence of virtual communities on the competition. We first study the content of the M5 virtual community by topic modeling and trend analysis. Further, we perform social media analysis to identify the potential relationship network of the virtual community. We find some key roles in the network and study their roles in spreading the LightGBM related information within the network. Overall, this study provides in-depth insights into the dynamic mechanism of the virtual community influence on the participants and has potential implications for future online competitions.