Here are a few data sets to play around with.
mtcars
print(head(mtcars))
mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
Mazda RX4 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 4 4
Mazda RX4 Wag 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 4 4
Datsun 710 22.8 4 108 93 3.85 2.320 18.61 1 1 4 1
Hornet 4 Drive 21.4 6 258 110 3.08 3.215 19.44 1 0 3 1
Hornet Sportabout 18.7 8 360 175 3.15 3.440 17.02 0 0 3 2
Valiant 18.1 6 225 105 2.76 3.460 20.22 1 0 3 1
This is a built-in data set. Use it for sorting, filtering etc.
Quickly generating a data set
You can use matrix to generate a quick dataset. The first argument must contain your data. You can use a distribution function or sample for it.
print(matrix(runif(6*3), nrow=6, ncol=3))
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 0.94210093 0.23582446 0.19571104
[2,] 0.45026399 0.77989358 0.69763985
[3,] 0.03567169 0.40572983 0.83394039
[4,] 0.31246289 0.08076585 0.74957412
[5,] 0.61316957 0.94886782 0.90769685
[6,] 0.94545758 0.48658449 0.03396954
Real US data: data.gov
The US government published data sets on data.gov. This includes US census data. Most files are in CSV format and you can use read.table to read them.
International data
The UN publishes data at data.un.org. This data is also available in CSV format.