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Summary: Some updates

Interpolated Marlov Chain (IMaCh program)

This program will be licensed under the GNU GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

The program estimates Health Expectancies from Cross-longitudinal
studies.
The main publication is Lievre, A. Brouard. N, Heathcote
Ch. Estimating Health Expectancies from Cross-longitudinal surveys,
Mathematical Population Studies, 10(1), 2003, pp. 1-52.

To be brief, for each people interviewed we need the age and health
status at each interview. Also the month and year of death should be
known as for birth.  We model the probability to be observed in any
state at any age via a parametric model and estimate the parameters
and their confidence interval by maximum likelihood. Many tables and
graphs are output in HTML. Graphs are built using gnuplot.

First versions appeared around year 2000. Currently (September 2015)
version 0.98q5 can run on any Unix, including OS/X and on Windows 10
(64bit) as well as Windows XP (32bit).

Binaries are usually provided for OS/X (DMG for 64bit), Linux (rpm)
and Windows installer (32 and 64bit).


STRUCTURE of the binary

IMaCh is a command line program (no time for a GUI) which means that
it can be run on a shell by $ imach foo.imach where foo.imach is your
'parameter' file which is a simple text file with a few lines that
your must edit in order to describe your data as well as your model
line. In this parameter file you give the name and path of your data
file which is also a text file.

Even if it is command line program, most operating systems offer
simplifications of use:

- On Windows, you can click on the imach.exe
icon (which opens a DOS window) and drag your parameter file into the
DOS windows and enter return. But with the newly installable version
(>0.97) you can use the right click (once your mouse cursor is on an
foo.imach file) to either edit the parameter file (with wordpad) or
execute this parameter file via imach. At the end of the run, your are
asked to enter a character and the terminal will not disappear.

- On OSX, you can click on the IMaCh application and terminal will be
  open: either type in the name and path of your parameter file or
  drag it from the finder.

The output of you run is a lot of text files which are grouped into a
sub-directory having the name of your parameter file as well as an
other text file foo.gp which is a gnuplot file. This gnuplot is run by
imach and creates a lot of graphs from the various results text files.
An other important file named foo.htm can be opened by your browser
and it will display various hyperlinks to most of your results as well
as your graphs.

You can edit this file, customize it at your will and run it to get
additional figures or modified figures to be published. Just click on
gnuplot.exe and type "load foo.gp" for example.

Gnuplot is a well known grapher under the GPL license too. As it is
changing often, the OS/X and Windows installers are providing binaries
for gnuplot 2.6.5.

Since the era of 64bit processors and their wide use on OS/X and
Windows 7, 8 or 10, we discovered that our usual GNU compiler were not
efficient on Windows 64 and current binaries are compiled with the
Intel C compiler.  On OS/X the native LLVM C compiler from Apple is
very efficient too.

Usually IMaCh binaries are distributed under two subdirectories, 'bin' for the
binaries which are imach.exe and gnuplot.exe and 'html' for some of the
documentation, and 'mytry' in order to test the program on a parameter
file named 'mypar.imach'.

By default the file 'gnuplot.exe' is located on the same directory as
imach and is used by imach with its absolute path. Thus, if you have
another gnuplot program which is already in your path it will not be used by
imach (we tried to simplify the installation process).

If you download a newer version of IMaCh, you are supposed to Uninstall the
former version with the standard Install/Uninstall process of Windows.

Enjoy (?) using IMaCh.

You may subscribe to imach-users@listes.ined.fr by sending a mail at
imach-users-subscribe@listes.ined.fr and you can unsubscribe with a
mail to imach-users-unsubscribe@listes.ined.fr .

Other comments are included on the Wiki server
http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/wiki, please use it ask questions too.

Nicolas Brouard (brouard at ined point fr)
Institut national d'études démographiques
133 Boulevard Davout
75014 Paris

Earlier versions were also written by 
Agnès Lièvre (former PHD student at INED)
Christopher Heathcote (ANU)