As part of my thesis, we wanted to investigate the ability of using z-scores as indicators for the homogeneity of clusters (or speaking more generally of partitions of a vector). After some modelling I believe this is not entirely possible and I would like to get some opinions on this. Suppose I have some 2D [data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A9bosNOscHgTzvRDbmKyd9Oqg6IXBwi21nI9ZUqR0C4/pub?gid=1062183471&single=true&output=csv) with one predictor `c` and my cluster assignment `cl`, which splits `c` into 5 groups of exactly 20 elements. There is little variation among the elements of `c` in every cluster and every cluster contains a distinct set of elements of `c`(i.e. cluster 1 contains mostly ones, cluster 2 mostly twos, a.s.o.). I then want to compute each indivdual cluster's z-score based on `c` as follows: # library(data.table) # dat<-as.data.table(dat) meanCl<-dat[,mean(c),by=cl][,V1,] mean0<-sapply(1:1000,function(x){ mean(sample(dat[,c,],20))} sd0<-sd(mean0) mean0<-mean(mean0) z<-(meanCl-mean0)/sd0 ... i.e. I compute the mean of `c` for every subgroup in `cl`. I go on to compute the mean of 1000 clusters containing 20 random elements from the distribution of `c`. I then calculate every clusters' z-score by subtracting its mean from the mean of the random clusters' means and divide by the standard deviation in those means to get: [1] -4.96401933 -4.05057547 -0.03142247 2.89159789 5.99730703 So even though all clusters are distinctly characterised in their internal distribution of `c`, the z-score for cluster 3 is basically 0, as its mean tends towards the mean of the sample distribution of `c`. Typing this out, it makes sense to me to not be able to use a cluster's z-score as a predictor for its uniqueness, however, as intially stated, I would like some ideas on this.