If your question is "how can I determine how many clusters are appropriate for a kmeans analysis of my data?", then here are some options. The wikipedia article on determining numbers of clusters has a good review of some of these methods. First, some reproducible data (the data in the Q are... unclear to me): n = 100 g = 6 set.seed(g) d <- data.frame(x = unlist(lapply(1:g, function(i) rnorm(n/g,