Exploring the social influence of the 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 platform for data scientists and machine learning practitioners. Kaggle provides a gathering place, or virtual community, for web users who are interested in the M5 competition. Users can share code, models, features, and loss functions through online notebooks and discussion forums. Here, we study the social influence of this virtual community on user behavior in the M5 competition. We first research 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 study the roles and characteristics of some key participants who promoted the diffusion of information within the M5 virtual community. Overall, this study provides in-depth insights into the mechanism of the virtual community’s influence on the participants and has potential implications for future online competitions.