How to Classify Machine Learning Models

A Discriminative model answers the question given the input x what is the most likely output y? Sometimes this is explicitly modeled as finding the output y that maximizes the probability y given x But some models answer the question without probabilities. In contrast a generative model answers the question what is the distribution of the input or sometimes what is the joint distribution of the inputs and output? The book data science in context by Chris Wiggins describes how these two types of machine learning models work.