Computing Health
Expectancies using IMaCh
(a Maximum
Likelihood Computer Program using Interpolation of Markov Chains)
March
2000
Authors of the program: Nicolas
Brouard, senior researcher at
the Institut
National d'Etudes Démographiques
(INED, Paris) in the "Mortality, Health and Epidemiology
Research Unit"
and Agnès Lièvre
Contribution to the mathematics: C. R.
Heathcote (Australian
National University, Canberra).
Installation
Since the program produces many output files, we suggest to
have a separate directory for imach.
- Uncompress the zip file imach.zip
into an empty directory, imach, for
example.
- Different sub-directories are created:
- doc: most of the documentation. The main document
is doc/imach.htm .
- bin:
- imach.exe the
executable for Windows 95/98/NT compiled
with gcc from cygwin.
- graph.gp: an output file which is used by
the grapher, gnuplot, described next:
- data: Here are two data files:
- data1.txt
which is the main data file on which the
program has been run as the example in
the main documentation.
- mydata.txt a
smaller data file which you can use for
your own trial.
- mytry: A sub-directory to try your self. The
imach program outputs its results as text
files (tables) but also images
(actually in gif format) which are obtained in a
second step by running gnuplot (see below) on a
gnuplot command file named 'graph.gp' but also a
single html file 'index.htm' which can be clicked
to summarize your run.
- src: This subdirectory contains the source of the
program. It can be obtained by asking us by mail mailto:brouard@ined.fr
and mailto:lievre@ined.fr
.
- gp37mgw: This is the
directory of the gnuplot software. Gnuplot for
Unix or Windows 95/98/NT can be accessed freely
with its reference manual from http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/gnuplot/.
The latest version, recently ported to windows,
has been included in imach.zip.
- Click on the imach.exe icon to open a window and run the
program.
- Read the file README.txt or, better, click on doc/imach.htm
Click
here to access to the detailed documentation
This software have been partly granted by Euro-REVES, a concerted
action from the European Union. It will be copyrighted
identically to a GNU software product, i.e. program and software
will be distributed freely for non commercial use. Sources are
not widely distributed today. You can get them by asking us with
a simple justification (name, email, institute) mailto:imach@ined.fr
Latest documentation can be accessed at http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach
Imach latest version (0.63 of 16 march 2000) can be downloaded in
zip file http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/imach.zip