UCI Machine Learning: Popular Datasets and Applications

Are you a researcher or a scholar who is looking for a reliable source of data for your machine-learning research? Or, are you simply a data science enthusiast wondering how you can get access to a collection of databases with a large number of resources for you to work with? This article has got answers for you. 

In this article, we will help you understand all about the UCI repository and how you can make the best out of it. This piece will give you a step-by-step guide on how to get into the UCI Machine Learning Repository and navigate your way through it for the best results. You will also learn tips that will be of great help to you when it is time to put the data you have gathered into use.

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What is the UCI Machine Learning Repository?

First things first, UCI is simply the University of California, Irvine. Way back in 1987, a student known as David Aha came up with the brilliant idea to store databases and make them accessible to researchers. As expected, students in the school dived into the new archive and this quickly facilitated its popularity all over the world.

Today, the UC Irvine machine learning repository is easily the first stop for a person thinking of doing some research in machine learning or data science. 

The University of California, Irvine, has done a good job in maintaining the dataset collection. They have also facilitated how more people can contribute to the archive and expand the resources it holds. Following David’s vision, what was once an ftp archive has grown to host a broad range of datasets and resources that assist in performing different machine learning and data science jobs.

The data in the machine learning repository are widely sourced. They are datasets obtained from different departments in the academia, industries, academia, and research organizations. The university goes a long way to acquire new data for the UC Irvine machine learning repository. This is what makes them a reliable source of live data in the world. To know more about it, head on to the Advanced Certificate Programme in Machine Learning & NLP from IIITB.

Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Data from UCI Machine Learning Repository

To access and get data from the machine learning repository of the University of California, Irvine, follow this guide:

• Open the UCI ML Website: Before you can get to the repository, you need to go to the official website of the UCI Machine Learning Repository. You can either get there directly through this link or go through the official UCI website. Visiting the official school website can be an opportunity for you to get more information if you are also considering doing a research program in UCI machine learning. When you are finally on the UCI ml repository website, you will find that it is a user-friendly platform. From its homepage, it has been designed to respond to actions of page visitors and make navigation easy.
• Browse and Explore Available Datasets: Now that you have gotten yourself familiar with the interface of the UCI repository homepage, you can go ahead to surf through the datasets. At the top of the page, you will notice an icon tagged, “Datasets”. Clicking on it will take you to the new page where you can scroll through to select a dataset. You can also search the machine learning repository for a specific resource and browse by keywords, data type, subject area, task, attributes. Researchers and visitors on the UCI ml repository can see detailed information on every dataset such as the data description, source, and citation guidelines.
• Read the Format of Your Dataset: You may find it difficult to understand your datasets at this stage. This is because they are usually stored in CSV, ARFF, or TXT format. CSV or comma-separated values is the standard file format for machine learning datasets because they are mostly involved with data in tables.  On the other hand, ARFF or Attribute-Relation File Format, is more popular with the ml software, Weka. ARFF makes it easier to work with a dataset on Weka. Your dataset will become clear to you after you have downloaded it.
• Download Datasets: It is quite easy to download from the machine learning repository. All you need to do is click on the dataset you want to download, and this will take you to a new page. On this new page, click on the “download” button and the file will be downloaded into your device. 
• Cite the Downloaded Dataset: To avoid plagiarism, it is important to cite every dataset obtained from the UCI repository. Below the download button on the data file page, you will find the “Cite” button. Simply click on this button to get the full citation details and guidelines for that file.

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Tips for Working with UCI Machine Learning Repository Data

Some relevant things to note before and while working with your dataset include:

• Process Your Data: As a researcher or a student in machine learning, you should not use data that you have not processed. The first stage to working with UCI machine learning data is cleaning the data. This helps you to deal with missing values, and change necessary variables to the appropriate numerical format. You need to carry out these preprocessing tasks before getting to your analysis and the building of your models with the data. 
• Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA): Another important thing to know as a user of machine learning data is the need to study your data for insights and patterns. Carrying out an EDA on the dataset you have downloaded from the UCI repository will help you notice relevant trends before you begin to work. You can do this with data visualization tools such as histograms, bar charts, pie charts, amongst others. With this, you can clearly see the spread of your data and how their different features affect each other. 
• Carry out Feature Engineering: This is a very vital process to help with the building of your machine learning model. If you do not already know what it is, feature engineering is a process that selects raw data and enhances the important variables into features that can be useful in making predictive models for machine learning. Oftentimes, the UCI Machine Learning Repository datasets would need feature engineering for them to create meaningful features for predictive modeling. This is why you need to perform it on your dataset.
• Test the Performance of Your Model: While building models, always remember to properly test how they are performing. To do this, you can use metrics such as confusion matrix, accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, F1 score, amongst others. Read more on these metrics here. Testing your models will help you rate them against new data and make better decisions in your building.
• Contribute to the UCI Machine Learning Repository: Many of the resources and unique datasets that you find on the UCI machine learning repository were uploaded by researchers and scholars like you. You should also consider adding to this knowledge base. Look through the donation policy of the UCI repository to see how you can contribute your special dataset to the community. This way, the repository will become even more universal.

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Conclusion

In every conversation about the top sources of reliable datasets in the world of machine learning, the UCI machine learning repository stands tall. It remains a powerful resource for the machine learning community worldwide and has aided the success of numerous researches  and innovations surrounding various aspects of AI.

This article has contributed to the growth of the AI community by providing a comprehensive guide on how to navigate the machine learning repository of the University of California. As a practitioner, we hope that you found this guide helpful for your research process.

Got more questions? Head on to getting started with this via Master of Science in Machine Learning & AI from LJMU.