Explainable Gradient Boosting for Transparent Phishing URL Detection: A Cross-Dataset, Statistically Validated SHAP Analysis of XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost
: Phishing remains one of the most persistent attack vectors in cybersecurity, and the gradient-boosting models that now dominate its automated detection are frequently deployed as opaque classifiers, which limits analyst trust and slows incident response. This paper presents a cross-dataset, explainability-driven eval...