The Great Dashboard Series: Where to Find Good Data Sets?
For those of you looking to up your data analytics portfolio or if you’re taking a Data Science class, you’re probably here right now - trying to figure out where you can find a decent data set. And when I say decent, I mean a data set that has accurate, complete data and is very informative.
Below we have provided you with a list of free, accessible data sets and resources that can help you begin your analytical journey.
COVID-19 Data
The Coronavirus Source Data is a repository for data examining confirmed cases, tests and death that are updated daily by John Hopkins University.
Website: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data
Health Data
If you want to conduct an analysis on health-related issues, then the World Health Organization and US Health Data have a vast data repository on various health conditions.
World Health Organization
Website: https://www.who.int/data/collections
2. Health Data
Website: https://healthdata.gov
US Government Datasets
If you’re interested in exploring the crime rates of a particular city or looking at the number of births in a county hospital, we suggest you use data provided by for the entire country or a particular state. You can find a wide variety of government data from city, state, federal, and international sources. These datasets are great for students looking to focus on environment, economy, health care, or demographics. Most states have datasets already available for you on their official website. Below you will find a couple that we have used in the past.
US Data Catalog
Website: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset
2. NYC Open Data
Website: https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us
3. Boston State Data
Website: https://data.boston.gov
Labor Force Research
If you’re researching wages and labor conditions, then The Economic Policy Institute and US Bureau of Labor Statistics provide you with up-to-date and historical data on the American labor force.
State of Working America
Website: https://www.epi.org/data/
2. US Bureau of Labor Statistics
Website: https://www.bls.gov/data/tools.htm
General Datasets
If you’re not sure what you want your analysis to be on, then we have a few resources for general datasets provided by the US government, Kaggle on topics such as avocado prices, math test results
Kaggle
Website: kaggle.com
Kaggle offers aggregated datasets, but it’s a community hub rather than a search engine. It is a renowned open data platform with tons of great datasets covering almost any topic.
2. UCI Machine Learning Repository
Website: https://mlr.cs.umass.edu/ml/datasets.html
UCI Machine Learning Repository is one of the oldest data sources, which has interesting data sets such as Email Spams, Wine Classifications and more. BEcause of the fairly small datasets, they are usually good for machine learning.
3. Google Public Data
Website: https://www.google.com/publicdata/directory#!
Google Public Data has more than 25 million datasets available and a search engine to help you navigate through those datasets. It is mostly used by data journalists and researchers.
The Great Dashboard Series is a tribute to the dashboards we have scraped, the countless hours we spent creating complex but beautiful graphs only to have people still ask what we were trying to show.