Hands-On Generative Adversarial Networks with Keras

Discriminative and generative models compared

Broadly speaking, machine learning models can be subdivided into discriminative models and generative models. Discriminative models learn a map from some input to some output. In discriminative models, learning the process that generates the input is not relevant; it will just learn a map from the to the expected output.

Generative models, on the other hand, in addition to learning a map from some input to some output, also learn the process that generates the input and the output.

Source: Ian Goodfellow's Tutorial on Generative Adversarial Networks, 2017

In this context, we say that discriminative ...