I've mulled this one over, and unless I am missing something, you are handling the "missing" values by not generating "missing" in the first place. Perhaps that is my fault, for constructing a "toy example" that is not well suited to illustration. Usually, I would be starting with a dataset from an outside source, "from the wild," where I do not have any control over the code or system that actually generates the sample data.
Here, I will present a typical example I would encounter importing real-world data:
In my sample data, I have two kinds of Missing ...
Missing["Unrecognized", "21.799999"]
Missing["Empty"]
To give a little context, these are being imported as a Dataset (in the Mathematica 10 sense) using Semantic Import[]. I can extract values from a column called "Days to Start a Business" that would typically contain a numeric value:
in := $CurrentData[All, "Days to Start a Business"] // Normal
out := {5, 4, Missing["Unrecognized",
"21.799999"], 18, 32, 13, 5, 10, 101, 15, 22, 60, 15, 101, 8, 17, 8,
Missing["Unrecognized", "16.5"], 84, 15, 27, 2, 14,
Missing["Unrecognized", "19.5"], 16, 9, 19, 97, 14,
Missing["Unrecognized", "26.1"],
Missing["Unrecognized", "75.5"], 32, 31, 8, 92, 29,
Missing["Unrecognized",
"4.5"], 8, 40, 11, 19, 11, 11, 13, 17, 36, 17,
Missing["Unrecognized",
"30.799999"], 19, 53, 35, 36, 7, 9, 5, 6, 12, 9,
Missing["Empty"], 11, 36, 38, 13, 33, 19, 32, 21,
Missing["Unrecognized", "7.5"], 34, 40,
Missing["Unrecognized", "7.5"], 90}
For those that are Missing["Unrecognized", "7.5"], one might choose to handle them by mapping some function onto the "unrecognized" values (eg. applying a rounding strategy to convert to the nearest integer) and replacing. I should note, I haven't yet explored an alternative possibility: specifying the type explicitly as a decimal in the semantic import statement. This function and its options are new to me.
For the values that are simply Missing["Empty"] a different approach would be required. In practice, the empty or "missing" values might be replaced by either the Min or Max of the non-empty members of the set.
But in explaining this in more detail, I am prompted to look into the documentation on "Missing Values" under SemanticImport, and will follow up if/when I find a solution.