Handling of map edges

[tristanstoeber]

Hey,
upon testing the behavior of the smooth_map function on nan values, i realized that the edges of the smoothed array drop in value. Is this how it should be?

[lepmik]

This is expected behavior as the map is zero padded before convolving. This is why we smooth the spike map and occupancy map separately and calculate the rate map as rate_map = smooth(spike_map) / smooth(occupancy_map), then the edge errors should be minimal. We don't have much testing and docs on this method, so if you'd like you can see if making two maps, say one with 1's, and one with 2's smooth separately and divide, then you should see similar values inside the matrix as on the edges.