UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository
archive.ics.uci.edu
archive.ics.uci.edu
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Free+Public+Data+Sets
If you know of any others, please post them.
List of data sets => http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-...
Another list of data sets => http://blog.mortardata.com/post/67652898761/6-dataset-lists-...
List of data sets on Quora => http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-large-datasets-open-to...
Sub-reddit for data sets => http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets
Coz they worked.
16 years of industrial machine learning research later...
The world is not like the UCI repository
Getting the data into the form that the analysis algorithm can parse, asking the question... that is the work. Ok, also dealing with the answer - that too.
Algorithms can be selected, it's not hard to learn which technique is suited to which situation.
What theory are you talking about? What do we have - Kearn's contributions on COLT and the descendant's there of (Michael Kearns is a great fella btw, and COLT is super - but so 1990's), or Vapnik and Structural Risk Minimisation?
It's not really physics is it?
Applying techniques to new problems involves data munging, and that is an important and useful task, but it is not difficult in the same way that doing new algorithmic work is, nor does it advance the state of the art.
There is no harm in developing a new algorithm, or coming up with new stories as to how it works, but to say that "data munging" will not advance the state of the art is to exclude the art! It's like saying that unless someone comes up with new physics it's impossible to build better spaceships.
And if Nasa were to build a better spaceship would that advance the state of the art in spaceship building?