  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.
