5 Great Places to Find Free Datasets for Your Next Project
Wondering where to find free and open datasets for your next data project? Then just stop by!
If you’re looking for a job in data analytics, you’ll need a portfolio to demonstrate your expertise.
Of course, if you’re new to data analytics, you probably don’t have any expertise!
But no worries!
The fact you might not have worked on a paid project yet doesn’t mean you can’t have a compelling portfolio using some practice datasets.
Fortunately, the Internet is full of datasets, most of which are completely free to download — thank god humans created the open data initiative! ;)
In this post, I share some first-rate repositories — which I used the most — where you can find any kind of dataset you want.
Any new source is welcome — so the list keeps expanding! If you have a favorite one, please let me know! :D
#1. Awesome-Public-Datasets on Github
This github hosts a library of awesome, public datasets! They are all sorted by category and link you straight to the hosting website. It is updated regularly and every day new datasets are being uploaded. Stay tuned! 👀
Access: Free to access, but does include some fee-based options. Type of data: Miscellaneous. Sample Datasets:
- The 1000 Genomes Project — The project ran between 2008 and 2015, creating the largest public catalog of human variation and genotype data.
- Plane crash database — Plane crash data dating from 1929 to now.
#2. Kaggle
Kaggle is a worldwide community that offers aggregated datasets. Kaggle launched in 2010 with a number of machine learning competitions, which subsequently solved problems for the likes of NASA and Ford. It has since evolved into a renowned open data platform, offering cloud-based collaboration for data scientists and tonnes of great datasets covering almost any topic you can imagine. Literally, you can find anything here!
It is the dataset source I use the most! :)
Type of data: Miscellaneous. Access: Free, but registration required. Sample Datasets:
- Daily temperature of major cities — Daily level average temperature values are present for world the world’s major cities.
- Glass Identification Data Set — Data set to train a model to identify different types of Glass.
#3. Google Dataset Search
It seems today we turn to Google for everything, and data is no exception. Launched in 2018, Google Dataset Search is like Google’s standard search engine, but strictly for data. It aggregates data from external sources, providing a clear summary of what’s available. It’s an excellent place to start checking around any new topic.
Type of data: Miscellaneous. Access: Free to search, but does include some fee-based search results. Sample Datasets:
- Births and Birth Rates Data in the USA — This dataset includes birth rates for females by age group in the United States since 1940.
- Global price of coffee— This dataset contains reviews of 1312 arabica and 28 robusta coffee beans from the Coffee Quality Institute.
#4. Datahub.io
The goal of many data analysts is to help drive savvy business decisions. As such, using economic or business datasets for your portfolio project might be worth considering. Datahub covers a wide variety of topics from health to demographics. However, it has a specific focus on economic fields like stock market data, property prices, inflation, and logistics.
Because many of the data on the portal is updated monthly — or even daily — you’ll always have something fresh to work with.
Type of data: Mostly business and finance. Access: Mostly free, no registration required. Sample Datasets:
- Average mass of glaciers since 1945 — Average cumulative mass balance of reference Glaciers worldwide from 1945–2014.
- City Population Annual Timeseries by city—City population by sex, city and city type.
#5. Datahub.world
Data.world provides a wide range of user-contributed datasets. It also offers a platform for companies to store and organize their data. You can find any kind of dataset. It presents a discovery function that allows you to know what are the most popular datasets at the moment. Nice to have!
Type of data: Mostly business and finance Access: Mostly free, no registration required Sample dataset:
- Coronavirus Daily Data — Coronavirus new cases, death and total cases updated daily by country.
- USA Chronic Disease Indicators — Provides cross-cutting set of 124 indicators that were developed by consensus and that allows states and territories and large metropolitan areas to uniformly define, collect, and report chronic disease data
Hope you find this useful! Any further questions you might have, do not hesitate on asking :)
Data always has a better idea — trust it.
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