Differentially Private Two-Stage Gradient Descent for Instrumental Variable Regression

• Yanhao Jin, Haodong Liang, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian and Lifeng Lai

• arxiv: https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22794 

We study instrumental variable regression (IVaR) under differential privacy constraints. Classical IVaR methods (like two-stage least squares regression) rely on solving moment equations that directly use sensitive covariates and instruments, creating significant risks of privacy leakage and posing challenges in designing algorithms that are both statistically efficient and differentially private. 

• We propose a noisy two-state gradient descent algorithm that ensures -zero-concentrated differential privacy by injecting carefully calibrated noise into the gradient updates. 

• Our analysis establishes finite-sample convergence rates for the proposed method, showing that the algorithm achieves consistency while preserving privacy. In particular, we derive precise bounds quantifying the trade-off among privacy parameters, sample size, and iteration-complexity. 

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to provide both privacy guarantees and provable convergence rates for instrumental variable regression in linear models. We further validate our theoretical findings with experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating that our method offers practical accuracy-privacy trade-offs.