Computing Health Expectancies using IMaCh

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

INED and EUROREVES

June 2004


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 (PHD student at INED)

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

Contact: Agnès Lièvre (lievre@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

New installation method

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 0.97b IMaCh we are using a windows installer (Inno setup). Both executables imach.exe and gnuplot.exe (the grapher that we are using) have to be on the same directory.
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).
But we discovered that on some computers, people are not allowed to modify the windows registry and need to have Administrator privileges.
Thus we built two windows installer: a standard setup which will install the progam (usually in \Program Files\imach and will modify the registry to associate .imach extension to notepad and imach, and a second which will not alter the registry. With this second installer you will be able to install the programs in your home directory and run it by clicking on the imach.exe icon. But you won't be able to use the facility of the right clicking.

Click here to access to the detailed documentation

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. 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
Imach version (0.63 of 16 march 2000) can be downloaded in zip file http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/imach.zip
Imach version 0.64 May 2001 can be downloaded in zip file http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/imach-0-64.zip
Imach version 0.8 March 2002 can be downloaded in zip file http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/imach-08.zip
Imach version 0.8a May 2002 can be downloaded in zip file http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/imach-08a.zip
Imach version 0.96d February 2004 can be downloaded in zip file http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/imach-096d.zip
Imach version 0.97b of June 21 2004 can be downloaded as a setup.exe file http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/imach-0.97b-2-setup.exe. The IMaCh program and gnuplot will be installed in the directory that you want (usually in Program Files). We made some errors in the new setup and some erlier versions did not work. Please check the md5sum which is 3cb42bf71396d531d4bc3d42fee46a52 imach-0.97b-2-setup.exe
We also changed the wordpad editor to notepad which is less useful but exists on most Windows installation.
For people who are not allowed to modify the registry of their Windows installation here is a second setup imach-0.97b-2-noreg-setup.exe.

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


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