Figures Abstract The classification of brain tumors is an unsolved problem associated with heterogeneity of tumors and fluctuations in imaging conditions. In this work, the investigation introduces a powerful novel framework, named LHW-Net that combines handcrafted features called local binary patterns (LBP), histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), and wavelet transform (WT). Within the LHW-Net framework, the extracted features are utilized in different machine learning classifiers, such as K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Classifier (SVC). The results of the individual classifiers are further combined using probabilistic score fusion approach to improve classification performance. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed work are validated by the achieved experimental results on commonly accepted benchmark datasets. Citation: Suryadevara T, Mahamkali N, Rafi M (2026) LHW-Net: An ensemble-based machine learning framework for brain tumor classification. PLoS One 21(4): e0346821. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0346821 Editor: Hikmat Ullah Khan, University of Sargodha, PAKISTAN Received: August 9, 2025; Accepted: March 24, 2026; Published: April 21, 2026 Copyright: © 2026 Suryadevara et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All the data used in the publication are publicly available in repositories with following URL’s Brain Tumor MRI Dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/masoudnickparvar/brain-tumor-mri-dataset. Brain Tumor Image Dataset https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/denizkavi1/brain-tumor/data. Br35H Brain Tumor Detection 2020 https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/ahmedhamada0/brain-tumor-detection. Funding: The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Research and Graduate Studies at King Khalid University for funding this work through Large Research Project under grant number RGP2/588/46. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Brain is an important organ that is at the hub of the human nervous system and collaborates with the spinal cord in order to coordinate body