Tara McIntosh

For WMEB paper at ALTW 2008: Weighted Mutual Exclusion Bootstrapping for Domain Independent Lexicon and Template Acquisition.

I was awarded an Australian Bicentennial Award to study at the University of Edinburgh for 3 months in 2007.

My honours work was published in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

In 2006, I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I now know what it is like to be in a room with 1000 women doing computer science.

With the support of the AUC I attended Apples' WWDC in San Francisco. There was definitely no line up for the little girls room.

Honours Research

Extracting Gene Networks - Rule and Pattern Based Approaches

I developed new Association Rule (AR) mining algorithms to extract gene relationships from microarray data. Existing microarray data mining techniques suffer from two major weaknesses -- restricting the number of genes which can be included in the analysis, and the assumption that only common gene relationships are of interest. My research rectified these. More specifically, I developed the first comprehensive AR algorithm, MaxConf, which can mine dense data with no support threshold (traditionally used to prune uncommon relationships), by incorporating new confidence threshold properties.

Publications

Tara McIntosh Honours Thesis, June 2005 - pdf

Tara McIntosh and Sanjay Chawla. High Confidence Rule Mining for Microarray Analysis. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, vol. 4, no. 4, pages 611-623, Oct-Dec, 2007.

Tara McIntosh and Sanjay Chawla. On discovery of maximal confident rules without support pruning in microarray data. In 5th ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Data Mining in Bioinformatics (BIOKDD '05), Chicago, IL, 2005.