How would you encode missing pixels in image data? I am working through an example on the MNIST dataset, and was just curious, if your image input data were missing some pixels, how would you encode it.  Since the values are always positive, and normalized between 0 and 1, would it make sense just to encode it as -1 or something.
Thanks
You'd substitute a statistical aggregator, such as the median or mean, for the missing data. Calculating the aggregator for a neighborhood region would &quot;smooth out&quot; the missing pixels.
You wouldn't set it to -1 because lost pixels are effectively noise, which you want to suppress, not exaggerate.