Multidimensional contributions to the water-energy-food nexus: Interpretable evidence from cities in China's Yellow river region

River basins are critical to resource security and sustainable development. Using panel data for 54 prefecture-level cities in provinces traversed by the Yellow River from 2006 to 2020, this study evaluates water–energy–food (WEF) coordination and examines its associated factors. An entropy-weighted coupling coordination model is combined with a CNN–BiLSTM–Attention model and SHAP analysis to capture nonlinear and heterogeneous contribution patterns, while a two-way fixed-effects model serves as a linear benchmark. The proposed model achieves a held-out evaluation R 2 of 0.726 and an RMSE of 0.088. Green expansion contributes the largest share to model predictions (29.23%), followed by growth (24.35%), carbon reduction (23.99%), and pollution reduction (22.43%). Ecological conditions, industrial structure upgrading, and digital development emerge as key factors. Digital development and green finance are generally associated with higher WEF coordination, whereas pollution emissions and intensive industrial activities are associated with constraints under specific conditions. The results support differentiated, place-based resource governance for the sampled cities.