July 2017
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
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".
Very old (historical) Windows versions are accessible here.
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.
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
In addition to INED, this software have been partly granted
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.
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.
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