Ryan Connolly-Kelley
Computer science
Hometown: Tempe, Arizona, United States
Graduation date: Spring 2025
FURI | Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Understanding the Root Causes for catELMo’s Superior Performance Embedding T-Cell Receptors With Respect to the Downstream TCR-Epitope Binding Affinity Prediction Task
Embedding variable-length strings of amino acids into a fixed-length vector is the first step in applying machine learning techniques to biological data. Better embedding methods yield better results in downstream tasks. Currently, the best embedding model for T-cell receptors is catELMo. The research team seeks to uncover the underlying reasons for catELMo’s superior performance compared with other embedding models (specifically GPT and BERT). The approach taken is to conduct a large-scale ablation study in which several hyperparameters of catELMo are varied, as well as the scale of the models, to determine what parameters have the greatest impact on downstream performance.
Mentor: Heewook Lee