24 Ultimate Data Science Projects To

Boost Your Knowledge and Skills (&

can be accessed freely)
ANALYTICS VIDHYA CONTENT TEAM, MAY 30, 2018

This article was originally published on October 26, 2016 and updated with new
projects on 30th May, 2018.

Introduction
Data science projects offer you a promising way to kick-start your career in this field.
Not only do you get to learn data science by applying it, you also get projects to
showcase on your CV! Nowadays, recruiters evaluate a candidate’s potential by
his/her work and don’t put a lot of emphasis on certifications. It wouldn’t matter if you
just tell them how much you know if you have nothing to show them! That’s where
most people struggle and miss out.

You might have worked on several problems before, but if you can’t make it
presentable & easy-to-explain, how on earth would someone know what you are
capable of? That’s where these projects will help you. Think of the time you’ll spend
on these projects like your training sessions. The more time you spend practicing,
the better you’ll become!

We’ve made sure to provide you with a taste of a variety of problems from different
domains. We believe everyone must learn to smartly work with huge amounts of
data, hence large datasets are included. Also, we’ve made sure all the datasets are
open and free to access.

Useful Information
To help you decide where to begin, we’ve divided this list into 3 levels, namely:

1. Beginner Level: This level comprises of data sets which are fairly easy to
work with, and don’t require complex data science techniques. You can solve
them using basic regression or classification algorithms. Also, these data sets
have enough open tutorials to get you going. In this list, we have also
provided tutorials to help you get started. You can also check out AV’s
‘Introduction to Data Science‘ course along with this!
2. Intermediate Level: This level comprises of data sets which are more
challenging in nature. It consists of mid & large data sets which require some
serious pattern recognition skills. Also, feature engineering will make a
difference here. There is no limit on the use of ML techniques; everything
under the sun can be put to use.
3. Advanced Level: This level is best suited for people who understand
advanced topics like neural networks, deep learning, recommender systems
etc. High dimensional datasets are also featured here. Also, this is the time
 to get creative. See the creativity best data scientists bring into their work and
codes.

Table of Contents
1. Beginner Level
o Iris Data
o Loan Prediction Data
o Bigmart Sales Data
o Boston Housing Data
o Time Series Analysis Data
o Wine Quality Data
o Turkiye Student Evaluation Data
o Heights and Weights Data
2. Intermediate Level
o Black Friday Data
o Human Activity Recognition Data
o Siam Competition Data
o Trip History Data
o Million Song Data
o Census Income Data
o Movie Lens Data
o Twitter Classification Data
3. Advanced Level
o Identify your Digits
o Urban Sound Classification
o Vox Celebrity Data
o ImageNet Data
o Chicago Crime Data
o Age Detection of Indian Actors Data
o Recommendation Engine Data
o VisualQA Data

Beginner Level
1. Iris Data Set
This is probably the most versatile, easy and resourceful dataset in pattern
recognition literature. Nothing could be simpler than the Iris dataset to learn
classification techniques. If you are totally new to data science, this is your start line.
The data has only 150 rows & 4 columns.

Problem: Predict the class of the flower based on available attributes.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

2. Loan Prediction Dataset
Among all industries, the insurance domain has one of the largest uses of analytics
& data science methods. This dataset provides you a taste of working on data sets
from insurance companies – what challenges are faced there, what strategies are
used, which variables influence the outcome, etc. This is a classification problem.
The data has 615 rows and 13 columns.

Problem: Predict if a loan will get approved or not.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

3. Bigmart Sales Data Set

Retail is another industry which extensively uses analytics to optimize business
processes. Tasks like product placement, inventory management, customized offers,
product bundling, etc. are being smartly handled using data science techniques. As
the name suggests, this data comprises of transaction records of a sales store. This
is a regression problem. The data has 8523 rows of 12 variables.

Problem: Predict the sales of a store.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

4. Boston Housing Data Set

This is another popular dataset used in pattern recognition literature. The data set
comes from the real estate industry in Boston (US). This is a regression problem.
The data has 506 rows and 14 columns. Thus, it’s a fairly small data set where you
can attempt any technique without worrying about your laptop’s memory being
overused.

Problem: Predict the median value of owner-occupied homes.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

5. Time Series Analysis Dataset
Time Series is one of the most commonly used techniques in data science. It has
wide ranging applications – weather forecasting, predicting sales, analyzing year on
year trends, etc. This dataset is specific to time series and the challenge here is to
forecast traffic on a mode of transportation. The data has ** rows and ** columns.

Problem: Predict the traffic on a new mode of transport.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

6. Wine Quality Dataset

This is one of the most popular datasets along data science beginners. It is divided
into 2 datasets. You can perform both regression and classification tasks on this
data. It will test your understanding in different fields – outlier detection, feature
selection, and unbalanced data. There are 4898 rows and 12 columns in this dataset.

Problem: Predict the quality of the wine.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

7. Turkiye Student Evaluation Dataset

This dataset is based on an evaluation form filled out by students for different
courses. It has different attributes including attendance, difficulty, score for each
evaluation question, among others. This is an unsupervised learning problem. The
dataset has 5820 rows and 33 columns.

Problem: Use classification and clustering techniques to deal with the data.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

8. Heights and Weights Dataset
This is a fairly straightforward problem and is ideal for people starting off with data
science. It is a regression problem. The dataset has 25,000 rows and 3 columns
(index, height and weight).

Problem: Predict the height or weight of a person.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

If you’re new to the world of data science, Analytics Vidhya has curated a
comprehensive course – ‘Introduction to Data Science’, aimed for beginners! We will
cover the basics of Python, before moving to Statistics and finally going through
various Modelling techniques.

Intermediate Level
1. Black Friday Dataset
This dataset comprises of sales transactions captured at a retail store. It’s a classic
dataset to explore and expand your feature engineering skills and day to day
understanding from multiple shopping experiences. This is a regression problem.
The dataset has 550,069 rows and 12 columns.

Problem: Predict purchase amount.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

2. Human Activity Recognition Dataset

This data set is collected from recordings of 30 human subjects captured
via smartphones enabled with embedded inertial sensors. Many machine learning
courses use this data for teaching purposes. It’s your turn now. This is a multi-
classification problem. The data set has 10,299 rows and 561 columns.

Problem: Predict the activity category of a human.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

3. Text Mining Dataset
This dataset is originally from the Siam Text Mining Competition held in 2007. The
data comprises of aviation safety reports describing problem(s) which occurred in
certain flights. It is a multi-classification and high dimensional problem. It has 21,519
rows and 30,438 columns.

Problem: Classify the documents according to their labels.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

4. Trip History Dataset

This dataset comes from a bike sharing service in the United States. This dataset
requires you to exercise your pro data munging skills. The data is provided quarter-
wise from 2010 (Q4) onwards. Each file has 7 columns. It is a classification problem.

Problem: Predict the class of user.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

5. Million Song Dataset

Did you know data science can be used in the entertainment industry also? Do it
yourself now. This data set puts forward a regression task. It consists of 5,15,345
observations and 90 variables. However, this is just a tiny subset of the original
database of data about a million songs.

Problem: Predict release year of the song.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

6. Census Income Dataset
It’s an imbalanced classification and a classic machine learning problem. You know,
machine learning is being extensively used to solve imbalanced problems such as
cancer detection, fraud detection etc. It’s time to get your hands dirty. The data set
has 48,842 rows and 14 columns. For guidance, you can check this imbalanced data
project.

Problem: Predict the income class of US population.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

7. Movie Lens Dataset

Have you built a recommendation system yet? Here’s your chance! This dataset is
one of the most popular & quoted datasets in the data science industry. It is available
in various dimensions. Here I’ve used a fairly small size. It has 1 million ratings from
6,000 users on 4,000 movies.

Problem: Recommend new movies to users.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

8. Twitter Classification Dataset

Working with Twitter data has become an integral part of sentiment analysis
problems. If you want to carve a niche for yourself in this area, you will have fun
working on the challenge this dataset poses. The dataset is 3MB in size and has
31,962 tweets.

Problem: Identify the tweets which are hate tweets and which are not.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

Advanced Level
1. Identify your Digits Dataset
This dataset allows you to study, analyze and recognize elements in the images.
That’s exactly how your camera detects your face, using image recognition! It’s your
turn to build and test that technique. It’s a digit recognition problem. This data set has
7,000 images of 28 X 28 size, totalling 31MB.

Problem: Identify digits from an image.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

2. Urban Sound Classification

When you start your machine learning journey, you go with simple machine learning
problems like titanic survival prediction. But you still don’t have enough practice when
it comes to real life problems. Hence, this practice problem is meant to introduce you
to audio processing in the usual classification scenario. This dataset consists of
8,732 sound excerpts of urban sounds from 10 classes.

Problem: Classify the type of sound from the audio.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

3. Vox Celebrity Dataset

Audio processing is rapidly becoming an important field in deep learning hence
here’s another challenging problem. This dataset is for large-scale speaker
identification and contains words spoken by celebrities, extracted from YouTube
videos. It’s an intriguing use case for isolating and identifying speech recognition.
The data contains 100,000 utterances spoken by 1,251 celebrities.

Problem: Figure out which celebrity the voice belongs to.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

4. ImageNet Dataset
ImageNet offers variety of problems which encompasses object detection,
localization, classification and screen parsing. All the images are freely available.
You can search for any type of image and build your project around it. As of now,
this image engine has more than 15 million images of multiple shapes sizing up
to 140GB.

Problem: Problem to solve is subjected to the image type you download.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

5. Chicago Crime Dataset

The ability to handle large datasets is expected of every data scientist these days.
Companies no longer prefer to work on samples when they the computational power
to work on the full dataset. This dataset provides you a much-needed hands-on
experience of handling large data sets on your local machines. The problem is easy,
but data management is the key! This dataset has 6M observations. It’s a multi-
classification problem.

Problem: Predict the type of crime.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

6. Age Detection of Indian Actors Dataset

This is a fascinating challenge for any deep learning enthusiast. The dataset contains
thousands of images of Indian actors and your task is to identify their age. All the
images are manually selected and cropped from the video frames resulting in a high
degree of variability interms of scale, pose, expression, illumination, age, resolution,
occlusion, and makeup. There are 19,906 images in the training set and 6,636 in the
test set.

Problem: Predict the age of the actors.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

7. Recommendation Engine Dataset
This is an advanced recommendation system challenge. In this practice problem,
you are given the data of programmers and questions that they have previously
solved, along with the time that they took to solve that particular question. As a data
scientist, the model you build will help online judges to decide the next level of
questions to recommend to a user.

Problem: Predict the time taken to solve a problem given the current status of the
user.

Start: Get Data

8. VisualQA Dataset
VisualQA is a dataset containing open-ended questions about images. These
questions require an understanding of computer vision and language. There is an
automatic evaluation metric for this problem. The dataset has 265,016 images, 3
questions per image and 10 ground truth answers per question.

Problem: Use deep learning technique to answer open-ended questions about

images.

Start: Get Data | Tutorial: Get Here

End Notes
Out of the 24 datasets listed above, you should start by finding the one that matches
your skillset. Say, if you are a beginner in machine learning, avoid taking up
advanced level data sets from the get go. Don’t bite more than you can chew and
don’t feel overwhelmed with how much you still have to do. Instead, focus on making
step-wise progress.

Once you complete 2 – 3 projects, showcase them on your resume and your GitHub
profile (very important!). Lots of recruiters these days hire candidates by checking
their GitHub profiles. Your motive shouldn’t be to do all the projects, but to pick out
selected ones based on the problem to be solved, domain and the dataset size. If
you want to look at complete project solution, take a look at this article.

Did you find this article useful? Have you already built any projects on these
datasets? Do share your experience, learnings and suggestions in the comments
section below.

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