Finding Public Data for Your Machine Learning Pipelines

The goal of the article is to help you find a dataset from public data that you can use for your machine learning pipeline, whether it be for a machine learning demo, proof-of-concept, or research project. It may not always be possible to collect your own data, but by using public data, you can create machine learning pipelines that can be useful for a large number of applications. Without data you cannot be sure a machine learning model works. However, the data you need may not always be readily available. Data may not have been collected or labeled yet or may not be readily available for machine learning model development because of technological, budgetary, privacy, or security concerns. Especially in a business contexts, stakeholders want to see how a machine learning system will work before investing the time and money in collecting, labeling, and moving data into such a system. This makes finding substitute data necessary. This article wants to provide some light into how to find and use public data for various machine learning applications such as machine learning demos, proofs-of-concept, or research projects.