InfoGuides: Find Data & Statistics: Datasets for Practice

Looking for datasets to practice your skills, complete a class project, or teach statistics?
This page highlights free, easy-to-use datasets for learning, exploration, and experimentation.

Good Places to Start

Kaggle Datasets - (registration required) user-contributed open data with preview or Competition Data
Google Dataset Search - Google search optimized for datasets
Generate Data.com - 30+ data types, 10+ data formats, even latitude/longitude and credit card data
See also all the other tabs in this guide that are not specifically for Statistics; much is freely available

More Suggested Datasets

Data Is Plural - Weekly feed (with archive) of interesting datasets
Awesome Public Datasets - large but categorized list by topic and data type
r/datasets (Reddit) - People ask for and suggest data on many different topics; AI-generated synthesis

Data with Projects

Competitions / Social Challenges

Tidy Tuesday - Weekly social data tidying and visualizing group (R-based) with archive of picks
Community Projects - Links from Tableau to a variety of data-visualization-focused challenges.
ML Contests - Aggregator of Data Science and Machine Learning competitions, from Kaggle, drivendata, and others.

Repositories with Examples

U.S. Census Data Science & Visualization Resources - Suggested projects using Census data and tools.
Large Data Sets - For those competing in a high school project content. Has abstracts for winners and other advice.
The Humanitarian Data Exchange - Has an API Library for Python. Links to showcases utilizing the data.

Smaller Data

Designed for Teaching

UCI Machine Learning Repository - table that can be filtered by data characteristics or topic
DASL: Dataset and Story Library - filter by number of cases and keyword. In tab-delimited format.
CORGIS: The Collection of Really Great, Interesting, Situated Dataset - Provided in different formats such as csv and json.

Provided for Replication or Reuse

fivethirtyeight - Datasets on politics and sports used in their articles
BuzzFeedNews - Datasets from investigative journalism projects
RDatasets - Repository for datasets distributed with R and various R packages for use in examples

Bigger Data

Access larger, more complex datasets ideal for machine learning, coding practice, and advanced analysis.

Repositories

AWS Data Exchange - Open Data - Many large datasets on a variety of topics (see also the Registry)
openBIGdata.org (BERD@NFDI) - A curated directory of open, large-scale datasets for research in business, economics, social sciences, and more.Examples: job postings, historical advertisements, sentiment data, and e-commerce behavior.
OpenML - Intended to provide training data for machine learning, with good metadata

Datasets

National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) - huge database of product injuries
MovieLens - Movie ratings in datasets of varying size, good for merging
Yelp Open Dataset - reviews, business attributes, and picture datasets. Get ideas from their challenges.