1. At a computer system including at least one processor and a memory, in a computer networking environment including a plurality of computing systems, a computer-implemented method for generating a sparse array to represent invalid values in a data array, the method comprising: an act of accessing one or more data entries in dense data array, wherein at least one of the data entries in the dense data array is invalid; an act of creating an associated sparse data array that includes a plurality of data entries with zero values and data entries with non-zero values, wherein the non-zero data entries are configured to store location information and data values for each of the invalid data entries in the dense array, and wherein the zero-value data entries are inferred from the location information of the non-zero data entries; and an act of storing the location information and data values of the invalid data entries in the sparse data array, wherein the data values stored in the sparse data array are proportional to the number of invalid values in the dense data array.