Computing Health Expectancies using IMaCh

(a Maximum Likelihood Computer Program using Interpolation of Markov Chains)

INED and EUROREVES

March 2015

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 (former PHD student at INED)

Contribution to the mathematics: C. R. Heathcote (Australian National University, Canberra).

Contact: Nicolas Brouard (brouard@ined.fr)

 Main publication concerning the method is Lièvre A., Brouard N. and Heathcote Ch. (2003) Estimating Health Expectancies from Cross-longitudinal surveys. Mathematical Population Studies.- 10(4), pp. 211-248. DOI 10.1080/713644739

Download and instructions for installation

Current versions March 2015

• On Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8): 0.98p0 and 0.98q0
• On MacOS/X Leopard: 0.98p0 and 0.98q0
• On Linux, ask for the CVS version

On Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8)

Until June 2004 the installation did consist in a zip file which had to be extracted in the directory of your choice. But with version 0.98d and above IMaCh we are using a windows installer (Inno setup 5.5.5).
In order to facilitate the use of IMaCh we associated the .imach extension to two features: editing and running. Thus by right clicking on a foo.imach file you can either 'edit'the file (default) with the notepad editor or 'run' it with gnuplot (you need a recent version).

You need to have the Administrator privileges to install the software. We don't propose anymore an installation which does not alter registry because we think that you all have access, even temporarly, to Administrator privileges (usally by right clicking the .exe you can choose "Install with Administrators privileges".

• Download latest imach-0.98p0-ilc-setup.exe and execute it .
• Gnuplot is installed by default on Windows. But if you are using another Operating system:
  • Download gnuplot 4.6.5 at http://www.gnuplot.info/ ; at the end of the install it is asked if you want to have the gnuplot binary in your path, say yes.
• Different sub-directories are created:
  • doc: most of the documentation. The main document is http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/wiki/index.php/Documentation .
  Here are also 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.
  • bin:
    • imach.exe
    • gnuplot, the grapher used by IMaCh. Its reference manual and sources can be accessed from http://www.gnuplot.info/.
  • src: This subdirectory contains the source of the program. It can be obtained by asking us by mail brouard at ined pointfr .
• Right click on the .imach to either edit it or execute it with IMaCh. At the end of the program, IMaCh uses gnuplot to produce the graphs, then you can open your browser to read the main .htm file with all results and graphs. If gnuplot is not installed or not in your path, you have to run gnuplot on the ".gp" source file generated by imach. Using wgnuplot you have to "open" it.
• Read the file README.txt

• On Windows 64bits, this Intel Compiler gives clearly quicker results because public domain C compilers, gcc, are not optimized for 64 bits OS yet.
• On OS/X we use the native Apple C compiler derived from gcc because it gives better results.
• On Linux, we use standard gcc.

Old Windows versions are accessible here.

On Mac OS/X Lion and higher (March 2015)

It take a litle more time to get version of Gnuplot 4.6.5+ for Mac OS/X and to compile it on a MaC. Currently graphs are output as png files. We will probably moved to svg because the svg format is scalable and thus figures are easier to improve and to insert in other documents.

You can download below a dmg file, for example imach0.98nX.dmg and install it. Like on Windows, two sub-directories are created bin and html . In the bin subdirectory you will find two executables imach itself and gnuplot. With recent versions, this tree is embedded in an Application.

You need to click on imach application and IMaCh will be launched in a Terminal window, asking you to enter the name of a parameter file. A parameter file is a text file with an extension .imach (but you can use a .txt extension if you want. Among the parameters required, a data file name has to be entered. It can be a relative file name like ../../data/data1.txt.
If you open a new finder you can drag an IMaCh parameter file into the terminal IMaCh Window that you just created.

At the end of the run, and it order for the terminal window not to disappear, the program will prompt for a command like "e" for editing/viewing the results (with your browser) or "q" for quit.
You can use the finder or browser (there is no more difference now) and click on the main .html (or .htm) file created. The name of this main html file is the same name as your parameter file, only the extension .imach is changed to .html. If you slightly change the parameters, you just have to give another name and the new results will not override the former.

On Linux

New (March 2015) You can download below a binary tar file for respectively a 32 bits or 64 bits Linux bo, for example: imach-Linux-0.98p0-linux-i586-bin.tar.bz2 and imach-Linux-0.98p0-linux-x86-64-bin.tar.bz2

The binaries have been crosscompiled with gcc on my OS/X Mac. Each binary contains two directories bin and html/doc . In the bin subdirectory you will find the imach executable and in html/doc the biaspar.imach test parameter file and its corresponding data file data1.txt. In order to run the test the command is ./bin/imach ./html/doc/biaspar.imach

gnuplot should be installed otherwise at the end of the run (optimization and calculations last at least 7 minutes on today most efficient hardwares) the command gnuplot biaspar.gp will fail. If successful, typing e will open biaspar.htm with your browser and all the results including graphs generated by gnuplot will appear. Please subscribe to the mailing list imach-users@listes.ined.fr for comments and reports on the performance (see the Performance section of the wiki).

Downloads

• If version 0.98q0 is run after version 0.98p0, ie using the estimated parameter file (the imach file which first letter is 'r' contains this estimated parameters, change mle=0 to mle=1), this new run could give more accurate results because an error in a routine of Numerical Recipes in C did not give the correct minimal). This program can also be used when the stepm value is reduced up to 1 (there are more chances to get a convergence with one month if you already got convergence for a larger stepm).
• Version 0.98p0 has more chance to converge with starting values equal to 0 than version 0.98q0 which diverges even with the sample imach parameter file provided with the installer!
• Differences between versions will be discussed at next REVES 2015 meeting in Singapore.

Other downloads and bugs reported

Click here to access to the detailed documentation

Grants

In addition to INED, this software have been partly granted

• by Euro-REVES, a concerted action from the European Union.
• In 2003-2004 it has been granted by the French Institute on Longevity.
• In January 2014, it has been granted by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 25293121.
• In 2015 by Intel Software by providing free licences for C/C++ on the three OS.

Our work is copyrighted as a GNU software product, i.e. program and software can be distributed freely for non commercial use, but actually some sources are not widely distributed today because they borrow some codes from the book "Numerical Recipes in C" which is copyrighted. If you are an owner of theses sources you can get our sources by asking us with a simple justification (name, email, Institute) mailto:imach-dev@listes.ined.fr

Today we are two developpers only but we already use a private CVS server. The CVS server will be freely accessible as soon as we have replaced "Numerical Recipes in C maximization routines" with equivalent routines from the new GNU scientific library.

Latest documentation can be accessed at http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/wiki/index.php/Documentation

There is a public mailing list of IMaCh's users. You can subscribe by sending a mail to imach-users-subscribe@listes.ined.fr (and unsubscribe with imach-users-unsubscribe@listes.ined.fr

IMaCh Wiki

Wikis are a promising way to give information closer to your expectations. It also a very dynamic movement if you consider the first International Wikimedia Conference in Francfurt (August 2005), where most Wikis were represented and in particular Wikipedia.

Access to the IMaCh Wiki