  One of the most significant differences of M5 over previous forecasting
competitions is that it was held on Kaggle, an online platform of 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, loss functions, etc.
through online notebooks and discussion forums. This paper aims to study the
social influence of virtual community on user behaviors 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 that promote 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.
