Combination Ensemble and Explainable Deep Learning Framework for High-Accuracy Classification of Wild Edible...

Accurate identification of wild edible macrofungi is essential for biodiversity conservation, food safety, and ecological sustainability, yet remains challenging due to the morphological similarity between edible and toxic species. In this study, a curated dataset of 24 wild edible macrofungi species was analyzed using six state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and four ensemble configurations, benchmarked across eight evaluation metrics. Among individual models, EfficientNetB0 achieved the highest performance (95.55% accuracy), whereas MobileNetV3-L underperformed (90.55%). Pairwise ensembles yielded inconsistent improvements, highlighting the importance of architectural complementarity. Notably, the proposed Combination Model, integrating EfficientNetB0, ResNet50, and RegNetY through a hierarchical voting strategy, achieved the best results with 97.36% accuracy, 0.9996 AUC, and 0.9725 MCC, surpassing all other models. To enhance interpretability, explainable AI (XAI) methods Grad-CAM, Eigen-CAM, and LIME were employed, consistently revealing biologically meaningful regions and transforming the framework into a transparent decision-support tool. These findings establish a robust and scalable paradigm for fine-grained fungal classification, demonstrating that carefully engineered ensemble learning combined with XAI not only advances mycological research but also paves the way for broader applications in plant recognition, spore analysis, and large-scale vegetation monitoring from satellite imagery.