Data is the new oil in the digital world. With the increase in the amount of available data, the craze for machine learning, data science, and data analytics has also increased. However, every dataset that is available online is not fit for analysis and building machine learning models. In this article, we will discuss various resources from where you can retrieve datasets for your machine learning projects. 

Best Machine Learning Datasets

When you plan to work on a machine learning project, You should not rush to find a dataset at first. Look at your needs, what are the goals of your project, and what algorithms and technologies you know. After identifying your skills and need, you can decide on the dataset and the machine learning model that you want to create. Following are some of the machine learning datasets that you can refer to for finding the required datasets.

Kaggle

Kaggle has one of the largest collections of machine learning datasets. Kaggle is a community-driven platform where you can find different machine learning datasets including areas like healthcare, sports, finance, stock markets, etc. As the platform is community-driven, you can find and download data sets at no cost. However, it comes with a certain disadvantage. You should be careful about the quality of data. Having data with errors will yield no result. 

Google Datasets

Just like google provides the google scholars platform for searching research papers, It provides a Dataset Search platform for searching datasets available at various platforms. You can search the datasets by their name, application area, time period, file type, etc. You can find a wide range of datasets contributed by different organizations such as the world health organization. Again, Google datasets don’t filter the data for their quality and compliance. So, you will have to make sure that you are legally allowed to download the dataset and use it. Also, you must make sure that the quality of data is good. Otherwise, your machine learning model will not generate expected results.

UCI Machine learning Repository

The University of California Irvine machine learning repository contains more than 600 datasets. It provides a searchable interface where you can search for your desired dataset. You can search datasets by area of application, title, file type, etc. All the datasets available at UCI machine learning repository are properly documented and contain links to various academic papers that might also help you in outlining your projects. 

GitHub Awesome Public Datasets

GitHub Awesome Public datasets is a GitHub repository containing various datasets contributed by the researchers. The repository contains datasets sorted by topics. All the datasets available at this repository are collected from blogs, answers, user responses, etc. As the collection consists of datasets from various resources, all the datasets are not freely available. You can directly download the freely available datasets. However, you will need to pay for some of the datasets.

Azure Public Datasets

Microsoft Azure provides a database of public datasets that contains datasets such as US government data, US census data, earth science data from NASA, airline data, and other various statistical and scientific data. The database maintains a table of data sources, information about the data, and information about the file type and format of data. You can use these datasets for testing and prototyping in your machine learning projects. 

SnowFlake Data Marketplace

Snowflake data marketplace provides various third-party datasets in an accessible format. It has more than 800 live and ready to query datasets from more than 200 third-party data providers. As the data is in ready to use format, you can access the data very efficiently and the chances of errors are also low. The data marketplace has datasets from different domains such as media and advertising, financial services, public sector, healthcare and life science,  and retail and CPG.

Appen

Appen provides various training datasets that include more than 250 licensed datasets that are available in 80 languages. The datasets include data for various applications such as speech recognition and natural language processing. Appen provides fully transcribed speech datasets for broadcast, call center, and telephony applications. It also provides text corpora notated for morphological information and named entities along with part of speech tagged lexicons and thesauri. You can access datasets in various file formats such as text, image, video, speech, and audio from Appen.

US Government Data Portal

The US government data portal provides more than 300,000 datasets that the US government makes available. It contains various datasets such as healthcare data, student loan data, healthcare provider charges data, navigation charts, monthly house prices indices, credit card complaints, etc. It also provides data on various aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. 

European Union Open Data Portal

Just like the US government data portal, the European Union Data Portal also offers various datasets from European Union institutions, population data, education data, etc. 

Berkeley DeepDrive

Berkeley DeepDrive platform is made available by UC Berkeley. It contains more than 100,000 video clips of different environmental, geographical, and weather conditions. All these video clips are annotated with bounding boxes to detect objects, lane markings, and various other segmentation tasks. You can use this dataset to train models for object detection in applications such as autonomous vehicles.

USDA Open Data Catalog

USDA Open Data Catalog provides data that is made available by the US department of agriculture. The dataset contains data from various factors of the agriculture sector in the US such as measured productivity, cost estimates, food-borne diseases, etc. 

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed various sources where you can find machine learning datasets. While you prepare for machine learning projects, you should learn to code in a programming language such as python. Python provides various libraries and frameworks that will help you build machine learning models in an effective way. You can learn python from various resources such as video courses from Coursera, YouTube, and other websites.

Stay tuned for more informative articles. 

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