How to Download Big Data for Data Science Projects Free of Cost

Check some top popular websites to download the free datasets available for various areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and domain-specific sciences. So, if you are in Machine learning, Artificial intelligence, or other Data science projects, this article may be beneficial for you.

Nowadays, the world is becoming datacentric in all means and every big/small company over the globe is investing huge amounts of money to get the right kind of data to make their work easy. When I say data it means any kind of data starting from user information who are interested in purchasing a BMW to data regarding the number of dogs present in some city say, New York.

This data plays a pivotal role in the revenue generation of the company by helping the stakeholders in a variety of ways like getting to know about the market scenario, getting to know about their competitors, etc. Due to this great hunt, a new stream of engineering has also evolved a lot and is supposed to take over the world in the coming days. This engineering/technology is called Artificial Intelligence.

Companies are hiring AI engineers/ML engineers/Data Scientists to handle the relevant data and generate meaningful insights out of it and in turn, the engineers are getting highly paid towards their contribution. But, have you ever wondered that how tough it is in actuality to get millions of data for your use case and then preprocess the same. A lot of time is expended in gathering information and this leads to the spending of huge amounts of money.

For a Big M company it is not a problem but for a small one like any fintech startup spending huge amounts of money at the beginning becomes a challenge. Well, if you are a learner or just working on some project where there is a requirement to test a huge amount of data then here in this article we have given some sources and that too at free of cost. So, let’s see some of those websites and use their open-source datasets for our use case.

Best Websites providing free Datasets to Download

1. Kaggle

This is a very known place in the AI world for getting any kind of data you want. The platform is owned by Google and provides you millions of datasets starting from small(MB’s) to large(GB’s). All you need to do is just register your account with Kaggle and that’s it. After the registration, you are free to download any type of data you want. The website also hosts different types of competitions for Data Science enthusiasts and offers handsome cash prizes in return. Link to Website

Here are a few examples of free datasets they provide:

  • Spotify Top 200 Charts (2020-2021)- https://www.kaggle.com/sashankpillai/spotify-top-200-charts-20202021
  • Tesla Stock Data 2016-2021- https://www.kaggle.com/ysthehurricane/tesla-stock-data-20162021
  • Latest Covid-19 India Statewise Data- https://www.kaggle.com/anandhuh/latest-covid19-india-statewise-data

Download free Datasets for Data science project from Kaggle

 

2. UCI Machine Learning Repository

This website is owned by the University of California Irvine and it hosts thousands of open-source datasets that can be downloaded free of cost for carrying out research-related activities for your problem statement. The website is well known in the field of AI and is considered one of the best for finding out domain-specific data. One more plus point of this website is that the datasets that are offered are mostly cleaned and one can directly use them to build their models and also there is no need to register your account here. Link to Website.

Some examples of datasets that this repository holds are:

  • Wine dataset- https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Wine
  • Gait classification dataset- https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Gait+Classification
  • Iris dataset- https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Iris

Machine learning repository

 

3. Data.Gov

This is one more platform where one can find n number of datasets for their business case and tweak them to build enhanced AI models. The website is famous for providing well-documented data so that there is no wastage of time in understanding the meaning it is conveying. If you are a data science enthusiast and want to get your hands dirty by building complex machine learning models then this is one of the best websites to explore for free Datasets. Link to Website.

Some famous datasets offered here include:

  • School system finances dataset- https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/annual-survey-of-school-system-finances
  • High Operational Temperature MWIR detectors with optical concentrators- https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/high-operational-temperature-mwir-detectors-with-optical-concentrators

Government big data for Machine learning or Artifical intelligence

 

4. Github- Free Datasets

This is one of the best open-source platforms where you can find qualitative data along with key insights and analyses. The portal is well known for acting as a vault that stores not only millions of data but also different programming codes that can be tweaked and used for your work. This website also lets you License your work and data under different Licensing certificates to secure it from others. Many famous companies rely on this portal because of its security and because of its brand value (owned by Microsoft).

See: github.com/awesome-public-datasets

Github free BIg data projects

 

5. Microsoft Research Open Data

Microsoft is now openly supporting various open-source projects and also providing free datasets to download for various areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and domain-specific sciences.  AI, ML developers, or various data researchers can have benefited from this. The Dataset on the website is divided into four categories, they are Computer Science, Social Science, Physics, and Information Science.

The user can visit and download the copy from – msropendata.com

Free Datasets from Microsoft

 

6. Academic Torrents

Well, Torrent is not a bad thing to use unless you are not downloading any pirated content. However, here we are listing Academic Torrents, a dedicated website to download various free datasets with descriptions, files size, and links to download the same. Even using an inbuilt search engine available on Academic Torrent we can filter and search for some particular type of Dataset. Apart from the data, you can download various free courses and papers. Moreover, because of the big data size, getting a dataset via BitTorrent or any other torrent application will be very easy.  Here is the Website link: Academictorrents.com

Academic Torrent to download free big data sets for AI

 

7.  Global Open Data Initiative

If you are interested in demographics, National laws, Government Budget, National Statistics, Procurement; Air Quality, National Maps; election results, and more… such kinds of free datasets are easily available to download on a website called – Global Open Data initiative. It is free, hence anybody can get to use these datasets for their projects.

Global Wor Index open datasets

 

 

Conclusion- Few other free datasets sources

By looking at the above we can conclude that there is never a deficiency of data in the world and one can find n number of them if explored properly. No need to invest huge amounts of money in the beginning, we should always focus on minimizing cost and finding alternatives that can cater to our needs efficiently. There are many other websites other than these that also provide big datasets to carry our research-related activities some of them being Driven Data, Google Public Datasets, PubMed for medical personnel, etc. So, one should explore these websites and play around with the open-source datasets.

 

 

1 thought on “How to Download Big Data for Data Science Projects Free of Cost”

  1. hello,
    Your information is so much amazing. You have provided best trick to download big data sets which free of cost. This is really a great article and a great read for me. I have found it so useful and informative specially this article. Thank you

    Reply

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