Recent advances in applications of machine learning in reward crowdfunding success forecasting

Entrepreneurs and small businesses have increasingly used reward-based crowdfunding to raise capital for their creative projects, whose success is central to this industry. Thus, predicting the success of crowdfunding campaigns is a topic of great importance for entrepreneurs and platform managers. The literature that employs monolithic classifiers and static ensemble learning for crowdfunding success prediction are scarce. In contrast, the dynamic selection (DS) algorithm, which belongs to the ensemble learning category, deserves a particular remark since it has overcome traditional monolithic classifiers and static ensembles in many applications. This paper proposes a dynamic selection framework for reward crowdfunding prediction. DS algorithms select a competent subset of the classifier per query instance. This procedure is performed during the generalization, and the subset is composed of local experts, favoring an increase in accuracy. Fifteen machine learning models are evaluated using three metrics (accuracy, area under the ROC curve and F-score), and ensemble learning obtained better results than traditional classifiers. In particular, Meta-DES, which performs dynamic selection, obtains the best overall results among the evaluated models. Furthermore, since usually interpreting the output of ML models is considered to be very difficult due to their complex “black box” architecture, we also use Shapley additive explanations to interpret the perdition’s outputs. Among variables evaluated in our models, the textual sentiment of the mass media, the number of pledges, and the target amount of the campaign deserve a highlight when predicting the campaign’s success. The source-code and further details about the experimental analysis are available at https://github.com/las33/Crowdfunding.