FiveThirtyEight

The Elo rating system predicts who should win a basketball game based on team strength. This dataset shows how every NBA team's rating changed after each game from 1946 onward. Think of Elo like a power ranking that goes up when you beat a strong team and down when you lose to a weak one. Before every game, you can see what Elo predicted the outcome would be. By the end, you can look at any team's Elo history and see when they got better or worse.

A philosophy major makes $42,200 on average, while a petroleum engineering major makes $120,000. This dataset shows what recent college graduates actually earn by major, how many find jobs in their field versus outside it, and whether they work full-time or part-time. You can see which majors have the highest unemployment rates, which ones hire more men or women, and how salaries stack up across different fields.

Someone at FiveThirtyEight asked people to choose between pairs of Halloween candies, thousands of times over. This dataset shows what each candy is made of, how expensive it is, and how often it won when matched up against others. Turns out chocolate matters a lot. Fruity candies? Not as much. You can see exactly which features make a candy a crowd favorite.

In the 1985-1999 period, commercial airlines had 664 fatal accidents worldwide. In 2000-2014, that dropped to 487. This dataset breaks down those numbers by airline, so you can see which carriers had accidents and fatalities in each era, and compare safety records as airlines got bigger. It's the raw numbers behind headlines about whether flying is getting safer.

Car accident data that shows which states have the deadliest roads, what causes those accidents (speeding, alcohol, distraction), and how much insurance costs. You can see how a state's safety record connects to insurance prices, and what percentage of accidents in each state involve drunk driving or other specific problems.