Research and Course Guides: OPMT 320: Decision Analysis: Getting Started

Welcome

Use this guide to find some resources for finding and using statistical datasets for OPMT 320.

Don't hesitate to contact me to discuss your data quest. We can connect in person, via telephone, email, or Zoom online meeting.

Sample Datasets

The resources here constitute test, sample, or practice data, or representative samples of live datasets that may be used in teaching and learning statistical analysis techniques. I recommend using these when the actual topic or question of your research is secondary to learning the techniques--if that is not the case, and the substance of the data matters, see our Datasets & Statistics guide or contact our Data Services Librarian.

CORGIS
CORGIS is The Collection of Really Great, Interesting, Situated Datasets, compiled by instructors at Virginia Tech.
R Datasets
A Github repository of datasets available through R packages (the download files will work in any statistical analysis tool). You can see the number of rows, the number of columns, and also how many columns are binary, character, numeric, etc. Includes download (.csv) and documentation links.
Dataset and Story Library (DASL)
Sample datasets organized by a by a Cornell University statistics professor.
Tableau Sample Datasets
Practice data collected by Tableau.
FiveThirtyEight Our Data page
An archive of the data and code behind many of the website's articles and graphics.
FuelEconomy.gov
Download fuel economy datasets by make, model, other variables.
Kaggle Datasets
Open dataset repository.
Kickstarter Project Data
Via our ICPSR membership. Create a free personal account using your St. Thomas email to download.
National Database of Childcare Prices
Sponsored by the Department of Labor Women's Bureau, the site contains a worksheet of county-level childcare price data from across the U.S. dating back to 2008, along with a Technical Guide (codebook) and associated research.
Office of the State Auditor: Municipal Liquor Store Operations Data
Annual data on the financial operations of city-owned liquor stores across Minnesota; this site includes raw data files and narrative reports. Includes both quantitative and categorical variables.
Sample Sales Data
This link is simply a Google search for "sample sales data by store", which will give you a number of possibilities
Tableau Public Sample Datasets
Tableau Public is a platform for sharing data visualizations made in their desktop software. Sample data for learning. Free personal account needed. If you have the desktop version you can download the underlying datasets from the visualizations.

Company & Industry Data

S&P Global NetAdvantage
Public company, mutual fund, and ETF data plus SEC filings, analyst research reports, industry reports, and stock screening & charting tools.
RMA Statement Studies
RMA's e-Statement Studies provides Industry level financial ratio benchmarks that can be compared with company data; industries are classified by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code.
IBISWorld Industry Market Research
IBISWorld Industry Market Research Reports provide in-depth industry analysis for 700+ U.S. industries and hundreds of international industries.
MRI-Simmons Catalyst
Demographics, psychographics, product usage, spending behavior, and media habits of U.S. adult consumers, based on national consumer surveys. Use it to create your own custom reports.
MRI-Simmons Catalyst user guide
ECDB
Global e-commerce data about online stores, market segments, brand and trend reports, etc., for thousands of stores in 50 countries.
From the landing page, select University Access in the upper right. If you reach a page prompting payment, copy the page URL and send an explanation with content title to our Ask a Librarian service.
PrivCo
Financials and information for hard-to-research private companies.
Due to monthly usage quotas, we recommend creating an individual account rather than using the Direct Access option.
Create an individual PrivCo account (register using your UST email address)
PrivCo user guide

Datasets

Statista
Statista is a database of frequently sought statistics and studies gathered by government sources, scientific publications, market researchers, non-profits, trade organizations, etc. Individual statistics are usually displayed as a graph and the underlying data is downloadable in Excel. Charts can be downloaded in various formats and can be great in papers or presentations. Search results also display dossiers (topical collections of statistics), infographics, country, industry, and some company reports.
SimplyAnalytics
Create custom thematic maps, datasets, and reports using extensive data on demographics, consumers, real estate, housing, employment, crime, health, and more. Data includes MRI-Simmons consumer survey data, Nielsen Scarborough local insights, consumer expenditures and buying power, as well as public data sources such as the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, FBI uniform crime reports, NOAA climate data, and CDC health data. Limited to 5 simultaneous users.
SimplyAnalytics user guide

FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)
FRED is a database of more than 55,000 economic time series maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Covers banking, business/fiscal, consumer prices, employment, population, exchange rates, gross domestic product (GDP), interest rates, money supply, producer price indexes (PPI), U.S. trade and international transactions, and U.S. financial data. Compiled by the Federal Reserve and collected from federal economic agencies.

Statistical Abstract of the United States
A summary of statistics on the social, political and economic conditions of the United States. Excel and PDF files of data tables are available for download. Coverage from 1970 to present.

Data.gov Data Catalog (.csv format)
A U.S. federal government cross-agency repository of open data sets. This link is filtered to comma-separated-value (.csv) formatted data. | Filtered to Excel format (.xlsx). You can also go to the main page of the site and browse/search topically.
IPUMS: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series
Census and survey microdata from U.S. and international sources, integrated across time and space. Covers demographic, economic, social, health, and education issues. University of Minnesota.
Sports-Reference.com
"A group of sites providing both basic and sabermetric statistics and resources for sports fans everywhere. Our aim is to be the easiest-to-use, fastest, most complete sources for sports statistics anywhere."
Awesome Public Datasets
A topic-centric list of high-quality open datasets in public domains, maintained on GitHub.