The optimal value of K is the one that minimizes the inertia or within-cluster sum of squares, while avoiding too many clusters that may overfit the data. The elbow plot shows a sharp decrease in inertia from K = 1 to K = 2, and then a more gradual decrease from K = 2 to K = 3. After K = 3, the inertia does not change much as K increases. Therefore, the elbow point is at K = 3, which is the optimal value of K for this data. References: How to Run K-Means Clustering in Python, K-means clustering - Wikipedia