MAGE: an efficient algorithm for identifying Maximal Age-indexed GEne sets.

MAGE identifies statistically significant maximal Age Index gene sets at genome scale by using a time-varying, network-based Age Index metric that captures gene influence changes.

• Why it matters: Aging reshapes transcriptional regulation in a tissue- and time-specific way, but common influence-maximization approaches use static snapshots and miss how gene-to-gene influence varies over time.
• What they did: The work defines the Age Index and formulates Maximal and Minimal Age Index Problems (MAP+ and MAP−), proving both are NP-hard; it then proposes MAGE, a stochastic iterative gene-set construction method.
• The result: MAGE finds statistically significant gene sets with strong literature support, enabling discovery of age-sensitive regulatory mechanisms linked to time-varying gene influence.

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