Hi guys, I’m hoping you’ll get an automatic e-mail notification when I post this. I didn’t want the effort you put into preparing your Datathon case to go to waste, so I worked up a solution for it. It’s linked in the general channel and the ZenCodeo channel.

The AR(1) seemed to perform the best. Using an ARIMA doesn’t improve things much and it’s not surprising considering what we saw from the autocorrelation plots. The values just aren’t strongly correlated with one another, meaning a higher order model brings very little improvement, if any.

Regarding the topics, we did suspect that the actual number would be higher, but we somehow got the impression that 5 topics is what we were expected to look for in this case. Perhaps we misunderstood the requirements.
Getting the model running took about a day and it left us very little time to play with the data and get to know it. To be sure, the model needs refining, but we were more focused on getting the thing to work from start to finish.