Curvature-based method for determining the number of clusters

Determining the number of clusters is one of the research questions attracting considerable interests in recent years. Majority of the existing methods require parametric assumptions and substantiated computations. In this paper we propose a simple yet powerful method for determining the number of clusters based on curvature. Our technique is computationally efficient and straightforward to implement. We compare our method with 6 other approaches on a wide range of simulated and real-world datasets. Theoretical motivation underlying the proposed method is also presented.