Developing an Explainable AI System for Digital Forensics: Enhancing Trust and Transparency in Flagging Events for Legal Evidence

Abstract—Advanced forensic approaches are required to handle digital crimes because they need to provide transparent methods that foster trust and enable interpretable evidence in judicial investigations. The current black-box machine learning models deployed in traditional digital forensics tools accomplish their tasks effectively yet fail to meet legal standards for admission in court because they lack proper explainability. This study creates an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) system for digital forensics to improve flagging events as legal evidence by establishing high levels of trust and transparency. A digital evidence system employs interpretable machine learning models together with investigative analysis techniques for the detection and classification of computer-based irregularities which generate clear explanations of the observed anomalies. The system employs three techniques including SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) alongside LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) and counterfactual reasoning to deliver understandable explanations about forensic findings thus enhancing investigation clarity for law enforcement agents and attorneys as well as stakeholder professionals. The system performs successfully on actual digital forensic datasets thus boosting investigation speed while minimizing wrong alerts and improving forensic decision explanations. The system must demonstrate GDPR and digital evidence admission framework compliance to maintain legal and ethical correctness for usage in court procedures. Forensic digital investigations need explainable Artificial Intelligence as an essential integration for creating reliable and legally sound practices.