A Survey of Interpretable and Black-Box Deep Neural Networks

Deep Neural Network (DNN), CNN, Interpretable, Uninterpretable, LSTM, Blackbox, DRBFNN

Authors

  • Ahmed Alhurdi Department of Computer Science University of Science and Technology Aden, Yemen
April 13, 2026
April 17, 2026

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This paper provides a more detailed overview of deep neural network (DNN) models with an emphasis on the potential for interpretability. The provided analysis categorizes the existing models based on interpretability (i.e., interpretable, post-hoc interpretable, or fully black-box models). The type of approach chosen for conducting the survey follows a well-structured methodology from several academic databases to comprehensively analyze the selected studies. The paper also analyzes explainability techniques such as SHAP and LIME, and investigates the trade-off in performance vs. complexity vs. interpretability with the existing models. The results of the analysis indicate that even though the black-box models have dominated in terms of peak accuracy, interpretable methods are improving comparably, achieving competitive results. Finally, this survey identifies three primary areas for future research that require attention: increased research related to model efficiency, transparency and scalability; lack of research addressing integration of explainability techniques into existing models; and unified low-complexity interpretability methods/models.