Step 9: Pixel Importance

Which features matter?

1 ExplorePlay below
2 ReadUnderstand
3 BuildHands-on lab
4 CompareSolution
💡 ReflectThink deeper

Which pixels predict the digit?

Each pixel has a correlation with the label. High correlation = that pixel helps the model classify. Drag the slider to keep only the most important pixels.

0.30
Correlation heatmap
Important pixels
Masked digit

Top 10 most predictive pixels

RankPixelPositionCorrelation
1 pixel_0 row 0, col 0 nan
2 pixel_32 row 4, col 0 nan
3 pixel_39 row 4, col 7 nan
4 pixel_52 row 6, col 4 0.391
5 pixel_27 row 3, col 3 0.275
6 pixel_35 row 4, col 3 0.266
7 pixel_12 row 1, col 4 0.244
8 pixel_28 row 3, col 4 0.234
9 pixel_33 row 4, col 1 0.223
10 pixel_29 row 3, col 5 0.216
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Think Deeper

In the Explore tab, set the correlation threshold to 0.5 and click 'Show on digit' several times. Can you still recognize the digits?

Usually yes — center pixels carry almost all the signal. This is feature selection: drop noisy columns (like TTL or source MAC) and keep the signal (entropy, byte distribution, timing patterns).
Cybersecurity tie-in: This is feature selection. In security ML: high-correlation features are dest_port, bytes_sent, entropy. Low-correlation features are source MAC, TTL. Dropping useless features makes models faster and more accurate.

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