AIExplainer

What is a discriminative model?

A model that predicts labels from a set of one or more features.

A model that predicts labels from a set of one or more features. More formally, discriminative models define the conditional probability of an output given the features and weights; that is:

For example, a model that predicts whether an email is spam from features and weights is a discriminative model. The vast majority of supervised learning models, including classification and regression models, are discriminative models. Contrast with generative model.

Practitioners refer to discriminative model when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.