Abstract/Summary

Ren and the second author established that the weakly optimal subvarieties (e.g. maximal weakly special subvarieties) of a subvariety V of a Shimura variety arise in finitely many families. In this article, we refine this theorem by (1) constructing a finite collection of algebraic families whose fibers are precisely the weakly optimal subvarieties of V; (2) obtaining effective degree bounds on the weakly optimal locus and its individual members; (3) describing an effective procedure to determine the weakly optimal locus.