# Clustering can be plotted only with more units than variables?

I am using R software (R commander) to cluster my data. I have a smaller subset of my data containing 200 rows and about 800 columns. I am getting the following error when trying kmeans cluster and plot on a graph:

'princomp' can only be used with more units than variables

I then created a test doc of 10 row and 10 columns whch plots fine but when I add an extra column I get te error again. Why is this? I need to be able to plot my cluster. When I view my data set after performing kmeans on it I can see the extra results column which shows which clusters they belong to.

Is there anything I am doing wrong, can I ger rid of this error and plot my larger sample?

• Err, what happened to reading the response from the same Q you asked on SO? stackoverflow.com/q/5686940/429846 Use prcomp() instead! The help page ?princomp even tells you this. Apr 17, 2011 at 12:51

The clustering itself has no problems with the p>n situation, however the visualization internally uses princomp (which is incapable of handling p>n) to plot the similarity space projection.
You can't fix that, at most try to reproduce similar graph by obtaining similarity space projection with cmdscale(dist(...)) and coloring the points with clusters.