We call Naive Bayes a generative model because we can read Eq. 4.4 as stating a kind of implicit assumption about how a document is generated: first a class is sampled from P(c), and then the words are generated by sampling from P(d|c). (In fact we could imagine generating artificial documents, or at least their word counts, by following this process). We'll say more about this intuition of generative models in Chapter 5.