Explainable AI-Driven Cyber Risk Analytics and Model Reliability Assessment for Intelligent Governance of U.S. Critical Infrastructure: An XGBoost and SHAP-Based Intrusion Detection Framework

The increasing penetrations of the critical infrastructure sector in the United States with intelligent digital technologies have greatly increased exposure to advanced cyber adversaries and operational vulnerabilities. AI-powered governance and automated decision-making systems are becoming a key part of the operation of critical infrastructure systems, including energy, healthcare, transportation, financial services, and communication infrastructure, in order to improve efficiency and strategic management. The growing cyber threat environment, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks, botnets, ransomware, and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose significant challenges to infrastructure resilience, cyber security reliability, and governance trustworthiness. In a changing attack landscape and dynamic network environment, traditional cybersecurity mechanisms can often fall short of meeting the evolving needs and protecting critical systems. This study will develop a resilient cyber risk analytics and model reliability assessment framework to support intelligent governance and decision support for cyber risk exposure in the U.S. critical infrastructure environment. This study is based on the CICIDS2017 dataset for the development and testing of intrusion detection system models and cyber risk prediction models based on machine learning. Various classifiers like XGBoost, Random Forest, and Decision Tree are used to detect malicious activities on the network and determine the level of cyber risk. Furthermore, the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques are integrated to enhance transparency, interpretability, and trust in cybersecurity decision-making processes. The proposed framework presents the reliability and resilience of the model by having various performance measures such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, ROC-AUC, and false positive rate.