Where to find data for your next ML/AI project

If you transition to Data Science from some other field, how can you show potential employers your value? Are certificates from multiple courses enough?

In most of the cases Data Scientist is a role, where multiple hands-on skills are expected. If you worked as data scientist, new company hiring you would expect you have a lot of hands-on experience and discussing what you did and which tools you used could be enough to get interview process started. Also, often code and visuals you created are the intellectual property of your previous employer, and nobody will force you to show that. However, if you don't have experience at a job in such a role yet, it does not mean you can't gain it. You can and you should do your own projects. As many as possible on topics, which are interesting to you. This is a way to apply the tools and techniques you learned in courses and also show your passion for the field.

An outstanding personal project does not necessarily require months of collecting and scrabbling your own data.

You can use one of many publicly available datasets.

For example Kaggle platform has plenty of data to play with. And also a community, where you can find advices if you get stack and also share results of your analysis.

If you prefer to use less polished data, plenty resource cover publicly available datasets all around the globe.

Check out awesomedata on github. It can bring you to the data from 30+ domains.

Many countries have portals with various statistics and datasets on various topics and granularity. E.g here is very interesting data collection for Gemany. Hamburg citizens particularly love Hamburg Urban Data Platform.

Another popular place for Urban Data lovers is NYC public data. To find any kind of data for USA, have a look at datausa.io

Place where researches often publish their datasets is Harvard Dataverse

If you strive for illuminating any kind of bias in the world, Gap Minder might have very interesting data for you.

Another great place, especially if you would like to practice SQL is BigQuery public datasets

And last, but not least, did you know that Google has a dataset search page? 

So finding the data is not so difficult. Finding the right tools and questions you can answer with it is more complicated. But is not this a reason why you wanted to become Data Scientist in the first place?🙂