Number of Principal Components to Use Use this option to specify the number of principal components to use for clustering of the individual cells for analysis. Twenty principal components are specified by default. In general, 20 to 30 principal components is a reasonable number for typical analyses. However, you can increase the number (to 50 or 60, for example) if you have a very large data set. To Specify the Number of Principal Components: Enter the desired value in the text field.