This study examines the effects of macroeconomic policies on financial markets using a novel approach that combines Machine Learning (ML) techniques and causal inference. It focuses on the effect of interest rate changes made by the US Federal Reserve System (FRS) on the returns of fixed income and equity funds between January 1986 and December 2021. The analysis makes a distinction between actively and passively managed funds, hypothesizing that the latter are less susceptible to changes in interest rates. The study contrasts gradient boosting and linear regression models using the Double Machine Learning (DML) framework, which supports a variety of statistical learning techniques. Results indicate that gradient boosting is a useful tool for predicting fund returns; for example, a 1% increase in interest rates causes an actively managed fund's return to decrease by-11.97%. This understanding of the relationship between interest rates and fund performance provides opportunities for additional research and insightful, data-driven advice for fund managers and investors.

Machine Learning (ML) with distributed privacy preservation is growing in significance as it focuses on facilitating multi-party learning without requiring actual data sharing. This is especially helpful for companies that want to work together but are unable to do so because of ethical, regulatory, or budgetary constraints on sharing data. In order to address these issues, this study examines three privacy-preserving algorithms: regularized logistic regression with Differential Privacy (DP), stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with differentially private updates, and a distributed Lasso that distributes gradients among data centers. The study emphasizes the relationship between error rate and privacy through these algorithms. In order to improve error rates for large datasets, both DP algorithms modify their sensitivity dependent on the amount of data, highlighting the significance of training data volume in model performance in the study. Results demonstrate that using the SGD; error rate can be reduced by employing random projections in advance.