5 Free Public Datasets Every New Analyst Should Practice With
If you're just starting out as a data analyst—or looking to sharpen your skills—one of the best ways to learn is by getting your hands dirty with real data. But not all datasets are created equal. You want data that’s rich enough to explore, complex enough to challenge you, and practical enough to mirror real-world use cases.
Here are five tried-and-tested public datasets that are perfect for analysts-in-training.
1. Netflix Movies and TV Shows Dataset
Source: Kaggle - Netflix Titles
Best For: Data cleaning, filtering, visual exploration
This dataset includes details about thousands of movies and TV shows on Netflix, like cast, genre, release year, ratings, and duration. It’s a great playground for cleaning messy data, performing EDA (exploratory data analysis), and even building dashboards.
Practice Ideas:
Identify trends in genres over the years
Analyze content production by country
Build a dashboard showing what’s trending
2. Airbnb Listings Dataset
Source: Inside Airbnb
Best For: Spatial analysis, pricing strategies, correlation work
This massive dataset includes listings from cities around the world with price, availability, location, host details, and more. It’s ideal for understanding geospatial data and exploring pricing models.
Practice Ideas:
Map listings by price and location
Explore seasonal pricing trends
Predict which features impact nightly rate
3. COVID-19 Data Repository by Johns Hopkins University
Source: GitHub - JHU CSSE
Best For: Time series analysis, real-world impact studies, data visualization
This is one of the most comprehensive COVID datasets, offering case numbers, deaths, and recovery statistics across countries and regions. It’s powerful for understanding how to work with evolving data over time.
Practice Ideas:
Visualize global trends over time
Analyze policy impact by region
Forecast future outbreaks using time series models
4. Spotify Tracks Dataset
Source: Kaggle - Spotify Dataset 1921–2020
Best For: Data wrangling, audio feature exploration, clustering
This dataset includes thousands of top tracks on Spotify with metadata like tempo, energy, danceability, and more. It’s perfect for learning how to handle categorical and numeric variables.
Practice Ideas:
Cluster songs based on their features
Track evolution of music styles by year
Build a recommender based on song similarity
5. US Census and Demographic Data
Source: Data.gov
Best For: Demographic analysis, dashboards, joining multiple datasets
This one’s a goldmine for real-world analysis. Data.gov offers a range of US Census datasets that you can use to explore population trends, income distribution, education levels, and more.
Practice Ideas:
Create heatmaps by income level or education
Join with employment data for richer insights
Build a report on socio-economic disparities
Final Thoughts: Practice Like It’s Real Work
Don’t just download and explore—simulate real-world analyst tasks. Frame questions, create mock stakeholder reports, and present findings visually. Practicing with high-quality public datasets will help you build intuition, confidence, and a portfolio that stands out.
