Looking for free datasets for projects? You’re in the right place. We’ve sourced and vetted spectacular datasets for the following:
- Python
- R
- Data science
- Data visualization
- Data cleaning
- Machine learning
- Probability and statistics
- Business analysis
- Excel
Datasets for Building Projects
If you’re trying to find free datasets so that you can learn by building projects, we have plenty of options for you. At Dataquest, most courses contain projects you can complete using real, high-quality datasets. The projects are designed to accelerate learning and showcase your skills with an irresistible portfolio. Interested? Check out some of the projects we have available below. Signing up is completely free and the datasets are downloadable.
Excel
Identify Customers Likely to Churn: Use an Excel dataset to conduct an exploratory data analysis (EDA) for a telecommunications provider to identify customers who are at risk of churn. Analyze Retail Sales: Work with retail sales data to explore trends and relationships. Build basic models to confirm the statistical significance of your insights. Our Data Analysis with Excel path contains 2 other projects. Sign up for free here.
Data Cleaning (Python)
Our Data Cleaning with Python path contains 4 other projects. Sign up for free here.
Data Analysis and Visualization (Python)
Our Data Analysis and Visualization with Python path contains 3 other projects. Sign up for free here.
Data Analysis (R)
Our R Basics for Data Analysis path contains 2 other projects. Sign up for free here.
Machine Learning (Python)
Predict House Sale Prices: Use housing data from a city in the United States to build and improve linear regression models. Predict the Stock Market: Use historical data from the S&P 500 Index to make predictions about future prices. Predict Bike Rentals: Use a machine learning dataset of bike rentals and apply decision trees and random forests to predict the number of future bike rentals. Our Machine Learning with Python path contains 4 other projects. Sign up for free here.
Probability and Statistics (Python)
Our Probability and Statistics with Python path contains 9 other projects. Sign up for free here.
Business Analysis
Analyze Retail Sales: Work with a retail sales dataset to explore trends and relationships. Build basic models to confirm the statistical significance of your insights. Identify Customers Likely to Churn: Use a training dataset from Kaggle to conduct an Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on data from a telecommunications provider to determine customers at risk of churn. Visualize Company Stock Performance: Create a report comprised of data visualizations to answer questions about company stock performance from one of four possible datasets. Our Business Analyst with Power BI career path contains 5 other projects. Sign up for free here.
Public Datasets for Data Visualization Projects
A typical data visualization project might be something along the lines of “I want to make an infographic about how income varies across the different states in the US.” There are a few considerations to keep in mind when looking for a good dataset for a data visualization project:
- It shouldn’t be messy because you don’t want to spend a lot of time cleaning data.
- It should be nuanced and interesting enough to make charts about.
- Ideally, each column should be well-explained so the visualization is accurate.
- The data set shouldn’t have too many rows or columns, so it’s easy to work with.
Good places to find good datasets for data visualization projects are news sites that release their data publicly. They typically clean the data for you and already have charts you can replicate or improve.
FiveThirtyEight
FiveThirtyEight is an incredibly popular interactive news and sports site started by Nate Silver. They write interesting data-driven articles, like “Don’t blame a skills gap for lack of hiring in manufacturing” and “2022 NFL Predictions.” View the FiveThirtyEight Datasets Here.
BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed started as a purveyor of low-quality articles but has since evolved and now writes some investigative pieces, like “The court that rules the world” and “The short life of Deonte Hoard.” View the BuzzFeed Datasets Here.
NASA
NASA is a publicly-funded government organization, and thus all of its data is public. It maintains websites where anyone can download its datasets related to earth science and datasets related to space. You can even sort by format on the earth science site to find all of the available CSV datasets, for example.
Public Datasets for Data Processing Projects
Sometimes, you just want to work with a large dataset. The end result matters less than the process of reading and analyzing the data. You might use tools like Spark or Hadoop to distribute the processing across multiple nodes. Things to keep in mind when looking for a good data processing dataset:
- The cleaner the data, the better — cleaning a large dataset can be very time-consuming.
- The dataset should be interesting.
- There should be an interesting question that can be answered with the data.
Good places to find large public data sets are cloud-hosting providers like Amazon and Google. They have an incentive to host the data sets because they make you analyze them using their infrastructure (and pay them to use it).
AWS Public Data sets
Amazon makes large datasets available on its Amazon Web Services platform. You can download the data and work with it on your own computer or analyze the data in the cloud using EC2 and Hadoop via EMR. You can read more about how the program works here. Amazon has a page that lists all of the free datasets for you to browse. You’ll need an AWS account, although Amazon provides a free access tier for new accounts that will enable you to explore the data without being charged.
Google Public Data sets
Much like Amazon, Google also has a cloud-hosting service, called Google Cloud Platform. With GCP, you can use a tool called BigQuery to explore large datasets. Google lists all of the data sets on a page. You’ll need to sign up for a GCP account, but the first 1TB of queries you make are free.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, online, community-edited encyclopedia. Wikipedia contains an astonishing breadth of knowledge, containing pages on everything from the You can find the various ways to download the data on the Wikipedia site.
Public Datasets for Machine Learning Projects
When you’re working on a machine learning project, you want to be able to predict a column from the other columns in a dataset. In order to be able to do this, we need to make sure that:
- The dataset isn’t too messy — if it is, we’ll spend all of our time cleaning the data.
- There’s an interesting target column to make predictions for.
- The other variables have some explanatory power for the target column.
There are a few online repositories of datasets that are specifically for machine learning. These datasets are typically cleaned up beforehand, and allow for testing of algorithms very quickly.
Kaggle
Kaggle is a data science community that hosts machine learning competitions. There are a variety of externally-contributed, interesting datasets on the site. Kaggle has both live and historical competitions. You can download data for either, but you have to sign up for Kaggle and accept the terms of service for the competition. You can download data from Kaggle by entering a competition. Each competition has its own associated dataset. There are also user-contributed datasets found in the new Kaggle Datasets offering. View Kaggle Datasets Here.
