Fig. 5. Functional and hierarchical annotation of the learned hidden social subnetworks.

To provide additional functional profiling, we related the derived subnetworks to previously reported clusters, which correspond to four decreasing hierarchical levels of social brain circuits (top to bottom rows): higher-associative, intermediate, limbic, and visual-sensory systems¹⁴. The red color indicates the cluster-per-cluster relevance that are parsed for the social subnetworks derived in the present study (x axis). This metric was calculated as the average (absolute) relevance of all brain regions part of a consensus cluster (color bar on z-scale). For instance, in subnetwork 15, aggregated relevance is distributed relatively evenly between higher-level and intermediate functional systems. In contrast, subnetworks 3, 7, 12, and 13 show stronger relations to the lower visual-sensory functional cluster. These alternative summaries of our results validate the previously investigated influence of these consensus clusters. These post-hoc exploratory results also highlight that we are able to build upon this existing knowledge with overlapping representations of different underlying subnetworks. Source data are provided in Supplementary Data 1.