Computing Health Expectancies using IMaCh

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

INED and EUROREVES

February 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

Installation

Since the program produces many output files, we suggest to have a separate directory for imach. A classical installation for Windows is on Program Files\imach

• Download latest imach-0.97b.exe and execute it .
• Different sub-directories are created:
  • doc: most of the documentation. The main document is doc/imach.htm .
  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 the executable for Windows 95/98/NT compiled with gcc from cygwin.
    • gnuplot, the grapher use by IMaCh and described next
  • 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/2K/XP can be accessed freely with its reference manual from http://www.gnuplot.info/. The latest version, recently ported to windows, has been included in imach.zip.
  • Right click on the .imach to either edit it or execute it with Imach.
  • 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. 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 2004 can be downloaded as a setup.exe file http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/imach-0.97b-setup.exe. The IMaCh program and gnuplot will be installed in the directory that you want (usually in Program Files).

  We set up 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