Missing values for the data to be used in a Neural Network model for prediction

I currently have a lot of data that will be used to train a prediction neural network (gigabytes of weather data for major airports around the US). I have data for almost every day, but some airports have missing values in their data. For example, an airpor开发者_如何学JAVAt might not have existed before 1995, so I have no data before then for that specific location. Also, some are missing whole years (one might span from 1990 to 2011, missing 2003).

What can I do to train with these missing values without misguiding my neural network? I though about filling the empty data with 0s or -1s, but I feel like this would cause the network to predict these values for some outputs.

I'm not an expert, but surely this would depend on the type of neural network you have?

The whole point of neural networks is they can deal with missing information and so forth.

I agree though, setting empty data with 1's and 0's can't be a good thing.

Perhaps you could give some info on your neural network?

I'm using a lot NNs for forecasting and I can say you that you can simply leave that "holes" in your data. In fact, NNs are able to learn relationships inside observed data and so if you don't have a specific period it doesn't matter...if you set empty data as a constant value you will have give to your training algorithm misleading information. NNs don't need "continuous" data, in fact it's a good practise to shuffle the data sets before training in order to do the backpropagation phase on not-contiguous samples...

Well a type of neural network named autoencoder is suitable for your work. Autoencoders can be used to reconstruct the input. An autoencoder is trained to learn the underlying data manifold/distribution. However, they are mostly used for signal reconstruction tasks such as image and sound. You could however use them to fill the missing features.

There is also another technique coined as "matrix-factorization" which is used in many recommendation systems. People use matrix factorization techniques to fill huge matrices with a lot of missing values. For instance, suppose there are 1 million movies on IMDb. Almost no one has watched even 1/10 of those movies throughout her life. But she has voted for some movies. The matrix is N by M where N is the number of users and M the number of movies. Matrix factorization are among the techniques used to fill the missing values and suggest movies to the users based on their previous votes for other movies.