Computing Health Expectancies using IMaCh

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

INED and EUROREVES

July 2017

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"

with the collaboration of Agnès Lièvre (former PHD student at INED) until 2007

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 July 2017

• On Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10): 0.99r14
• On MacOS/X Leopard: 0.99r14
• On Linux, ask for the CVS version

On Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10)

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-0.99r14-ilc-setup.exe and execute it .
• Gnuplot is installed by default on Windows. But if you are using another Operating system:
  • Download gnuplot 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 (which are unfortunately the best examples for recent features of IMaCh):
  • 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.

Very old (historical) Windows versions are accessible here.

On Mac OS/X Lion and higher (July 2017)

It take a litle more time to get version of Gnuplot 5+ for Mac OS/X and to compile it on a MaC. Currently graphs are output as svg because the svg format is scalable and thus figures are easier to improve and to insert in other documents. Sometimes the svg file is to big and is replaced by a png binary file. But you can get any other format with gnuplot (for example, on Emacs with gnuplot-mode, just edit the .gp file, send the first "cd " line to change to current directory, move to corresponding line of the plot, send the plot line to gnuplot, visualize on the screen, change the terminal as well as plot file names).

You can download below a dmg file, for example imach0.99X.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 (July 2017) You can download below a binary rpm file for a 64 bits Linux, for example: imach-0.99r14-1.x86-64.rpm

The Windows binaries have been compiled with native Intel Compiler on my OS/X Mac using Virtual Box and a Windows 8. 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.

Differences between efficiency of binary versions, related to former errors in the likelihood optimizations algorithms, have be discussed at REVES 2015 meeting in Singapore.

OS	OS subtype	Version		Compiler	File to download	MD5 cheksum
Windows	32&64bits	0.98p0		Intel Compiler 2015 with VisualStudio2013	imach-0.98p0-ilc-setup.exe	c4c8d47d24c76f6d2a5b0bfc52c43395
			0.98q0	Intel Compiler 2015 with VisualStudio2013	imach-0.98q0-ilc-setup.exe	a7d40b3288d84187633a07289492f7dd
OS/X	64 bits	0.98p0		Apple LLVM version 6.0 (clang-600.0.56)	imach0.98p0.dmg	94e75fe3d141d9e5394ce3c53b98b987
			0.98q0	Apple LLVM version 6.0 (clang-600.0.56)	imach0.98q0.dmg	b4dbd03d9bb2039cfc6a013411789ad6
Linux	64bits	0.98p0		gcc-4.8.1-for-linux64	imach-Linux-0.98p0-linux-x86-64-bin.tar.bz2	0974bcf30596f94f97d0e80acaf5a1bb
	64bits		0.98q0	gcc-4.8.1-for-linux64	imach-Linux-0.98q0-linux-x86-64-bin.tar.bz2	769f1153e78e6dd34d483aaa9fddd50b
	32bits	0.98p0		gcc-4.8.1-for-linux32	imach-Linux-0.98p0-linux-i586-bin.tar.bz2	034fe6ca6dfeb84eb2d735dea7ad7a9b
	32bits		0.98q0	gcc-4.8.1-for-linux32	imach-Linux-0.98q0-linux-i586-bin.tar.bz2	0d9c4d982ea43eda4b2dd058441459b3

Download (Old download) 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.
• In 2016 by Intel Software extended the free licences for C/C++ on the three OS for three yars.

Our work is copyrighted as a GNU software product, i.e. program and software can be distributed freely for non commercial use. We used some codes from the first book "Numerical Recipes in C" (Press et al, 1992) which is copyrighted. Today, the code of the optimization programme has been so altered and many bugs have been fixed, see communication at the 2015 REVES meeting in Singapore) that we consider that we are only in debt of the algorithm which has been published. If you want to get our sources, please ask us with a simple justification (name, email, Institute) mailto:imach-dev@listes.ined.fr

Latest documentation can be accessed on the wiki 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) for help, comments and reports on the performance (see the Performance section of the wiki). Archives can be accessed at https://listes.ined.fr/arc/imach-users

If you ask for help, it is usually easier to send the parameter file, the .log file as well as some records of the datafile.

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