This Generative Modelling Case Study requires students to design, implement and evaluate Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) across a range of synthetic and real-world applications. The coursework develops both theoretical understanding and practical deep-learning skills, with emphasis on building models, evaluating generated data and critically interpreting model performance. The assessment addresses research understanding, originality, future development and scholarly communication in data science. Generative modelling case study… Part 1 – Building and Understanding GANs from Scratch focuses on fundamental GAN concepts using synthetic two-dimensional data. Students first reproduce a sine-wave GAN from the tutorial and then create a second synthetic distribution using either a 2D spiral, a mixture of Gaussians or a noisy parametric curve. They must modify aspects of the GAN architecture, such as activation functions or network depth, and visually compare generated samples with the original data distribution. Generative modelling case study… Part 2 – Real-World GAN Applications extends the work across three application domains. The first application uses the BloodMNIST subset of MedMNIST to train a DCGAN that generates synthetic blood-cell microscope images. Students explore the dataset, analyse class distributions, train the model, monitor generator and discriminator losses and compare real and generated images using both visual inspection and quantitative measures such as the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID). An optional extension involves implementing a class-conditioned GAN capable of generating images from specific categories. Generative modelling case study… The second application addresses cybersecurity using the CICIDS 2017 intrusion-detection dataset. Students construct a GAN that generates synthetic network-traffic feature vectors rather than images. The model is trained using benign and denial-of-service traffic, and generated samples are compared with real traffic using dimensionality-reduction techniques such as PCA or t-SNE. Students must evaluate how closely the synthetic traffic reflects the distribution of genuine network data. An extension allows analysis of the full CICIDS dataset and evaluation across different attack types. Generative modelling case study… The third application explores Creative AI using the Google QuickDraw pizza category. Students implement another DCGAN to generate artificial pizza sketches, track training behaviour across epochs, and compare generated sketches with genuine examples using both visual inspection and quantitative metrics such as FID. Extension work may examine additional QuickDraw categories and investigate how model performance changes with class and sketch complexity. Generative modelling case study… Submission consists of a 6–8 page report together with working code. The report should explain the analysis undertaken, justify modelling decisions, describe the network architectures, interpret the results and incorporate suitable figures, evaluation metrics and references. The accompanying code must reproduce the figures, models and numerical results reported and must execute successfully when tested. Generative modelling case study… The marking scheme places 60% of the marks on code and 40% on the report. Within the coding component, 40 marks relate to completing the GAN modelling tasks and 20 marks assess code quality, modularity and annotation. The report is assessed on discussion and interpretation of the analysis, justification of architectural choices, results presentation, document quality, figures and appropriate academic references. Generative modelling case study… Important for the public Reference Library: the brief explicitly states that students must not use generative AI to write the report, and the rubric states that AI-generated report text can result in zero marks for the whole assignment. Therefore, use this entry only as a high-level public description of the assessment and do not present generated report content as something students can submit directly. Generative modelling case study… Generative modelling case study…
Generative Adversarial Networks · GANs · Generative Modelling · Deep Learning · PyTorch · TensorFlow · Keras · DCGAN · Conditional GAN · cGAN · Synthetic Data · Sine-Wave GAN
Megaminds has supported academic requirements in data science / artificial intelligence / generative modelling and related disciplines.