Hybridizing Explainable AI (XAI) for Intelligent Feature Extraction in Phishing Website Detection

This study proposes an explainability-driven feature selection framework for phishing website detection using a large-scale, heterogeneous dataset collected from four independent sources. The combined dataset contains approximately 500,000 samples, including 300,000 phishing pages and 200,000 legitimate pages, providing a comprehensive representation of real-world web traffic. To enhance model interpretability and reduce feature redundancy, four explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques—SHAP, LIME, partial dependence plots (PDPs), and permutation importance (PDI)—were applied to rank and analyze feature contributions. The union of all selected features was subsequently refined through a thresholding mechanism, forming the proposed Hybrid Explainability Random Forest Algorithm (HXRF). A Random Forest (RF) classifier was trained using the optimized feature subset and evaluated on an independently sampled set of 2000 webpages. Results demonstrate that HXRF significantly improves classification performance, achieving an accuracy of 98.2%, with balanced precision, recall, and F1 scores. The confusion matrix confirms strong generalization across both phishing and legitimate classes, with minimal false predictions. This work demonstrates that combining multi-method XAI with selective feature filtering produces a compact, interpretable, and highly discriminative feature set capable of robust phishing detection at scale.