Completing your first project is a major milestone on the road to becoming a data scientist and helps to both reinforce your skills and provide something you can discuss during the interview process. It’s also an intimidating process. The first step is to find an appropriate, interesting data set. You should decide how large and how messy a data set you want to work with; while cleaning data is an integral part of data science, you may want to start with a clean data set for your first project so that you can focus on the analysis rather than on cleaning the data.

Based on the learnings from our Introduction to Data Science Course and the Data Science Career Track, we’ve selected data sets of varying types and complexity that we think work well for first projects (some of them work for research projects as well!). These data sets cover a variety of sources: demographic data, economic data, text data, and corporate data.



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1. United States Census Data

The U.S. Census Bureau publishes reams of demographic data at the state, city, and even zip code level. It is a fantastic data set for students interested in creating geographic data visualizations and can be accessed on the Census Bureau website. Alternatively, the data can be accessed via an API. One convenient way to use that API is through the choroplethr.In general, this data is very clean, very comprehensive and nuanced, and a good choice for data visualization projects as it does not require you to manually clean it.

2. FBI Crime Data

The FBI crime data is fascinating and one of the most interesting data sets on this list. If you’re interested in analyzing time series data, you can use it to chart changes in crime rates at the national level over a 20-year period. Alternatively, you can look at the data geographically.

3. CDC Cause of Death

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains a database on cause of death. The data can be segmented in almost every way imaginable: age, race, year, and so on. Since this is such a massive data set, it’s good to use for data processing projects.



4. Medicare Hospital Quality

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services maintains a database on quality of care at more than 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the U.S., providing for interesting comparisons. Since this data will be spread over multiple files and might take a bit of research to fully understand, this could be a good data cleaning project.

5. SEER Cancer Incidence

The U.S. government also has data about cancer incidence, again segmented by age, race, gender, year, and other factors. It comes from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. The data goes back to 1975 and has 18 databases, so you’ll have plenty of options for analysis.



6. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Many important economic indicators for the United States (like unemployment and inflation) can be found on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Most of the data can be segmented both by time and by geography. This large data set can be used for data processing and data visualization projects.



7. Bureau of Economic Analysis

The Bureau of Economic Analysis also has national and regional economic data, including gross domestic product and exchange rates. There’s a huge range in the different groups of data found here—you can browse by place, economic accounts, and topics—and these groups are organized into even smaller subsets throughout.

8. IMF Economic Data

For access to global financial statistics and other data, check out the International Monetary Fund’s website. There are a few different sets here, so you can use them for a wide range of projects like visualization or even cleaning.

9. Dow Jones Weekly Returns

Predicting stock prices is a major application of data analysis and machine learning. One relevant data set to explore is the weekly returns of the Dow Jones Index from the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems at the University of California, Irvine. This is one of the sets specially made for machine learning projects.



10. Data.gov.uk

The British government’s official data portal offers access to tens of thousands of data sets on topics such as crime, education, transportation, and health. Since this is an open data source with millions of entries, you’ll be able to practice data cleaning across different groupings.

11. Enron Emails

After the collapse of Enron, a free data set of roughly 500,000 emails with message text and metadata were released. The data set is now famous and provides an excellent testing ground for text-related analysis. You also can explore other research uses of this data set through the page.

12. Google Books Ngrams

If you’re interested in truly massive data, the Ngram viewer data set counts the frequency of words and phrases by year across a huge number of text sources. The resulting file is 2.2 TB! While this might be difficult to use for a visualization project, it’s an excellent data set for cleaning as it’s nuanced and will require additional research.

13. UNICEF

If data about the lives of children around the world is of interest, UNICEF is the most credible source. The organization’s public data sets touch upon nutrition, immunization, and education, among others, making for a great resource for visualization projects.

14. Reddit Comments

Reddit released a really interesting data set of every comment that has ever been made on the site. It’s over a terabyte of data uncompressed, so if you want a smaller data set to work with Kaggle has hosted the comments from May 2015 on their site.

15. Wikipedia

Wikipedia provides instructions for downloading the text of English-language articles, in addition to other projects from the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikipedia Database Download is available for mirroring and personal use and even has its own open-source application that you can use to download the entirety of Wikipedia to your computer, leaving you with limitless options for processing and cleaning projects.



16. Lending Club

Lending Club provides data about loan applications it has rejected as well as the performance of loans that it has issued. The free data set lends itself both to categorization techniques (will a given loan default) as well as regressions (how much will be paid back on a given loan).

17. Walmart

Walmart has released historical sales data for 45 stores located in different regions across the United States. This offers a huge set of data to read and analyze, and many different questions to ask about it—making for a solid resource for data processing projects.

18. Airbnb

Inside Airbnb offers different data sets related to Airbnb listings in dozens of cities around the world. This dataset, given its specificity to the travel industry, is great for practicing your visualization skills.

19. Yelp

Yelp maintains a free dataset for use in personal, educational, and academic purposes. It includes 6 million reviews spanning 189,000 businesses in 10 metropolitan areas. Students are welcome to participate in Yelp’s dataset challenge, giving you quite a few options and an additional incentive for various types of data projects.



20. Google Trends Data

Google has one of the most interesting data sets to analyze. While we’re using “e-learning” in this example, you can explore different search terms and go as far back as 2004. All you have to do is download the dataset into a CSV file to analyze the data outside of the Google Trends webpage. You can download data on interest levels for a given search term, interest by location, related topics, categories, search types (video, images, etc), and more! Google also lists out a large collection of publicly available datasets on the Google Public Data Explorer. Make sure to check it out!

21. World Trade Organization

For students looking to learn through analysis, the World Trade Organization offers many data sets available for download that give students insight into trade flows and predictions. Those with a knack for business insights will particularly appreciate this set this dataset, as it provides tons of opportunities to not only get into data science but also deepen your understanding of the trading industry.

22. International Monetary Fund

This site has several free excel data sets for download on different key economic indicators. From Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to inflation. Taking the data from multiple files and condensing it for clarity and patterns is an excellent (and satisfying!) way to practice data cleaning.

23. U.S Energy Information Administration Open Data

This source has free and open data that is available in the bulk file, in Excel via the add-in, in Google Sheets via an add-on, and via widgets that embed interactive data visualizations of EIA data on any website. The website also notes that the EIA data is available in machine-readable formats, making it a great resource for machine learning projects.

24. TensorFlow Image Dataset: CelebA

For practice with machine learning, you’ll need a specialized dataset such as TensorFlow. The TensorFlow library includes all sorts of tools, models, and machine learning guides along with its datasets. CelebA is an extremely large, publicly available online, and contains over 200,000 celebrity images.

25. TensorFlow Text Dataset

Another TensorFlow set is C4: Common Crawl’s Web Crawl Corpus. Available in 40+ languages, this open-source repository of web page data spans seven years of data, making for an excellent resource for machine learning dataset practice.

Is data science the right career for you?

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Check out Springboard’s Data Science Career Track to see if you qualify.

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