When Running K-Means Clustering, Factor Analysis, or Principal Component Analysis, “There are not enough columns after removing the columns with only NA or a single value” error shows up

When running K-Means clustering, Factor Analysis, or Principal Component Analysis, you may encounter the following error:

There are not enough columns after removing the columns with only NA or a single value

This error occurs when the selected variables contain missing values, which causes the corresponding rows to be excluded from the analysis. As a result, there may no longer be enough data to perform the analysis. Alternatively, the error may occur when one of the variables contains only a single unique value from the outset.

To address this error, consider the following actions:

  • Remove columns with a high proportion of missing values from the analysis.
  • Impute missing values beforehand.
  • Exclude any variables that contain only a single unique value.

By applying these steps, you can check whether the issue is resolved and proceed with the analysis.