12 min read

“It’s not who has the best algorithm that wins. It’s who has the most data” ~ Andrew Ng

If you would look at the way algorithms were trained in Machine Learning, five or ten years ago, you would notice one huge difference. Training algorithms in Machine Learning are much better and efficient today than it used to be a few years ago. All credit goes to the hefty amount of data that is available to us today. But, how does Machine Learning make use of this data?

Let’s have a look at the definition of Machine Learning. “Machine Learning provides computers or machines the ability to automatically learn from experience without being explicitly programmed”. Machines “learn from experience” when they’re trained, this is where data comes into the picture. How’re they trained? Datasets!  

This is why it is so crucial that you feed these machines with the right data for whatever problem it is that you want these machines to solve.

Why datasets matter in Machine Learning?

The simple answer is because Machines too like humans are capable of learning once they see relevant data. But where they vary from humans is the amount of data they need to learn from. You need to feed your machines with enough data in order for them to do anything useful for you. This why Machines are trained using massive datasets.

We can think of machine learning data like a survey data, meaning the larger and more complete your sample data size is, the more reliable your conclusions will be. If the data sample isn’t large enough then it won’t be able to capture all the variations making your machine reach inaccurate conclusions, learn patterns that don’t really exist, or not recognize patterns that do.

Datasets help bring the data to you. Datasets train the model for performing various actions. They model the algorithms to uncover relationships, detect patterns, understand complex problems as well as make decisions.

Apart from using datasets, it is equally important to make sure that you are using the right dataset, which is in a useful format and comprises all the meaningful features, and variations. After all, the system will ultimately do what it learns from the data. Feeding right data into your machines also assures that the machine will work effectively and produce accurate results without any human interference required.

For instance, training a speech recognition system with a textbook English dataset will result in your machine struggling to understand anything but textbook English. So, any loose grammar, foreign accents, or speech disorders would get missed out. For such a system, using a dataset comprising all the infinite variations in a spoken language among speakers of different genders, ages, and dialects would be a right option.

So keep in mind that it is important that the quality, variety, and quantity of your training data is not compromised as all these factors help determine the success of your machine learning models.

Top Machine Learning Datasets for Beginners

Now, there are a lot of datasets available today for use in your ML applications. It can be confusing, especially for a beginner to determine which dataset is the right one for your project.

It is better to use a dataset which can be downloaded quickly and doesn’t take much to adapt to the models. Further, always use standard datasets that are well understood and widely used. This lets you compare your results with others who have used the same dataset to see if you are making progress.

You can pick the dataset you want to use depending on the type of your Machine Learning application. Here’s a rundown of easy and the most commonly used datasets available for training Machine Learning applications across popular problem areas from image processing to video analysis to text recognition to autonomous systems.

Image Processing

There are many image datasets to choose from depending on what it is that you want your application to do. Image processing in Machine Learning is used to train the Machine to process the images to extract useful information from it.

For instance, if you’re working on a basic facial recognition application then you can train it using a dataset that has thousands of images of human faces. This is how Facebook knows people in group pictures. This is also how image search works in Google and in other visual search based product sites.

Dataset Name Brief Description
10k US Adult Faces Database This database consists of 10,168 natural face photographs and several measures for 2,222 of the faces, including memorability scores, computer vision, and psychological attributes. The face images are JPEGs with 72 pixels/in resolution and 256-pixel height.
Google’s Open Images Open Images is a dataset of 9 million URLs to images which have been annotated with labels spanning over 6000 categories. These labels cover more real-life entities and the images are listed as having a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Visual Genome This is a dataset of over 100k images densely annotated with numerous region descriptions ( girl feeding elephant), objects (elephants), attributes(large), and relationships (feeding).
Labeled Faces in the Wild This database comprises more than 13,000 images of faces collected from the web. Each face is labeled with the name of the person pictured.

 

Fun and easy ML application ideas for beginners using image datasets:

  • Cat vs Dogs: Using Cat and Stanford Dogs dataset to classify whether an image contains a dog or a cat.
  • Iris Flower classification: You can build an ML project using Iris flower dataset where you classify the flowers in any of the three species. What you learn from this toy project will help you learn to classify physical attributes based content to build some fun real-world projects like fraud detection, criminal identification, pain management ( eg; ePAT which detects facial hints of pain using facial recognition technology), and so on.
  • Hot dog – Not hot dog: Use the Food 101 dataset, to distinguish different food types as a hot dog or not. Who knows, you could end up becoming the next Emmy award nominee!

Sentiment Analysis

As a beginner, you can create some really fun applications using Sentiment Analysis dataset. Sentiment Analysis in Machine Learning applications is used to train machines to analyze and predict the emotion or sentiment associated with a sentence, word, or a piece of text. This is used in movie or product reviews often. If you are creative enough, you could even identify topics that will generate the most discussions using sentiment analysis as a key tool.

Dataset Name Brief Description
Sentiment140 A popular dataset, which uses 160,000 tweets with emoticons pre-removed
Yelp Reviews An open dataset released by Yelp, contains more than 5 million reviews on Restaurants, Shopping, Nightlife, Food, Entertainment, etc.
Twitter US Airline Sentiment Twitter data on US airlines starting from February 2015, labeled as positive, negative, and neutral tweets.
Amazon reviews This dataset contains over 35 million reviews from Amazon spanning 18 years. Data include information on products, user ratings, and the plaintext review.

 

Easy and Fun Application ideas using Sentiment Analysis Dataset:

  • Positive or Negative: Using Sentiment140 dataset in a model to classify whether given tweets are negative or positive.
  • Happy or unhappy: Using Yelp Reviews dataset in your project to help machine figure out whether the person posting the review is happy or unhappy.  
  • Good or Bad: Using Amazon Reviews dataset, you can train a machine to figure out whether a given review is good or bad.

Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing deals with training machines to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. This is how search engines like Google know what you are looking for when you type in your search query. Use these datasets to make a basic and fun NLP application in Machine Learning:

Dataset Name Brief Description
Speech Accent Archive This dataset comprises 2140 speech samples from different talkers reading the same reading passage. These Talkers come from 177 countries and have 214 different native languages. Each talker is speaking in English.
Wikipedia Links data This dataset consists of almost 1.9 billion words from more than 4 million articles. Search is possible by word, phrase or part of a paragraph itself.
Blogger Corpus A dataset comprising 681,288 blog posts gathered from blogger.com. Each blog consists of minimum 200 occurrences of commonly used English words.

 

Fun Application ideas using NLP datasets:

  • Spam or not: Using Spambase dataset, you can enable your application to figure out whether a given email is spam or not.

Video Processing

Video Processing datasets are used to teach machines to analyze and detect different settings, objects, emotions, or actions and interactions in videos. You’ll have to feed your machine with a lot of data on different actions, objects, and activities.

Dataset Name Brief Description
UCF101 – Action Recognition Data Set This dataset comes with 13,320 videos from 101 action categories.
Youtube 8M YouTube-8M is a large-scale labeled video dataset. It contains millions of YouTube video IDs, with high-quality machine-generated annotations from a diverse vocabulary of 3,800+ visual entities.

 

Fun Application ideas using video processing dataset:

Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is the ability of a machine to analyze or identify words and phrases in a spoken language. Feed your machine with the right and good amount of data, and it will help it in the process of recognizing speech. Combine speech recognition with natural language processing, and get Alexa who knows what you need.

Dataset Name Brief Description
Gender Recognition by Voice and speech analysis This database identifies a voice as male or female, depending on the acoustic properties of voice and speech. The dataset contains 3,168 recorded voice samples, collected from male and female speakers.
Human Activity Recognition w/Smartphone Human Activity Recognition database consists of recordings of 30 subjects performing activities of daily living (ADL) while carrying a smartphone ( Samsung Galaxy S2 ) on the waist.
TIMIT TIMIT provides speech data for acoustic-phonetic studies and for the development of automatic speech recognition systems. It comprises broadband recordings of 630 speakers of eight major dialects of American English, each reading ten phonetically rich sentences, phonetic and word transcriptions.
Speech Accent Archive This dataset contains 2140 speech samples, each from a different talker reading the same reading passage. Talkers come from 177 countries and have 214 different native languages. Each talker is speaking in English.

 

Fun Application ideas using Speech Recognition dataset:

Natural Language Generation

Natural Language generation refers to the ability of machines to simulate the human speech. It can be used to translate written information into aural information or assist the vision-impaired by reading out aloud the contents of a display screen. This is how Alexa or Siri respond to you.

Dataset Name Brief Description
Common Voice by Mozilla Common Voice dataset contains speech data read by users on the Common Voice website from a number of public sources like user-submitted blog posts, old books, movies, etc.
LibriSpeech This dataset consists of nearly 500 hours of clean speech of various audiobooks read by multiple speakers, organized by chapters of the book with both the text and the speech.

 

Fun Application ideas using Natural Language Generation dataset:

  • Converting text into Audio: Using Blogger Corpus dataset, you can train your application to read out loud the posts on blogger.

Autonomous Driving

Build some basic self-driving Machine Learning Applications. These Self-driving datasets will help you train your machine to sense its environment and navigate accordingly without any human interference. Autonomous cars, drones, warehouse robots, and others use these algorithms to navigate correctly and safely in the real world. Datasets are even more important here as the stakes are higher and the cost of a mistake could be a human life.

Dataset Name Brief Description
Berkeley DeepDrive BDD100k This is one of the largest datasets for self-driving AI currently. It comprises over 100,000 videos of over 1,100-hour driving experiences across different times of the day and weather conditions.
Baidu Apolloscapes Large dataset consisting of 26 different semantic items such as cars, bicycles, pedestrians, buildings, street lights, etc.
Comma.ai This dataset consists of more than 7 hours of highway driving. It includes details on car’s speed, acceleration, steering angle, and GPS coordinates.
Cityscape Dataset This is a large dataset that contains recordings of urban street scenes in 50 different cities.
nuScenes This dataset consists of more than 1000 scenes with around 1.4 million image, 400,000 sweeps of lidars (laser-based systems that detect the distance between objects), and 1.1 million 3D bounding boxes ( detects objects with a combination of RGB cameras, radar, and lidar).

 

Fun Application ideas using Autonomous Driving dataset:

  • A basic self-driving application: Use any of the self-driving datasets mentioned above to train your application with different driving experiences for different times and weather conditions.  

IoT

Machine Learning in building IoT applications is on the rise these days. Now, as a beginner in Machine Learning, you may not have advanced knowledge on how to build these high-performance IoT applications using Machine Learning, but you certainly can start off with some basic datasets to explore this exciting space.

Dataset Name Brief Description
Wayfinding, Path Planning, and Navigation Dataset This dataset consists of samples of trajectories in an indoor building (Waldo Library at Western Michigan University) for navigation and wayfinding applications.
ARAS Human Activity Dataset This dataset is a Human activity recognition Dataset collected from two real houses. It involves over 26 millions of sensor readings and over 3000 activity occurrences.

 

Fun Application ideas using IoT dataset:

Read Also: 25 Datasets for Deep Learning in IoT

Once you’re done going through this list, it’s important to not feel restricted. These are not the only datasets which you can use in your Machine Learning Applications. You can find a lot many online which might work best for the type of Machine Learning Project that you’re working on.

Some popular sources of a wide range of datasets are Kaggle,  UCI Machine Learning Repository, KDnuggets, Awesome Public Datasets, and Reddit Datasets Subreddit.

With all this information, it is now time to use these datasets in your project. In case you’re completely new to Machine Learning, you will find reading, ‘A nonprogrammer’s guide to learning Machine learning’quite helpful.

Regardless of whether you’re a beginner or not, always remember to pick a dataset which is widely used, and can be downloaded quickly from a reliable source.

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Natasha Mathur
Tech writer at the Packt Hub. Dreamer, book nerd, lover of scented candles, karaoke, and Gilmore Girls.