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This article presents a type-based analysis for deriving upper bounds on the expected execution cost of probabilistic programs. The analysis is naturally compositional, parametric in the cost model, and supports higher-order functions and inductive data types. The derived bounds are multivariate polynomials that are functions of data structures. Bound inference is enabled by local type rules that reduce type inference to linear constraint solving. The type system is based on the potential method of amortized analysis and extends automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA) for deterministic programs. A main innovation is that bounds can contain symbolic probabilities, which may appear in data structures and function arguments. Another contribution is a novel soundness proof that establishes the correctness of the derived bounds with respect to a distribution-based operational cost semantics that also includes nontrivial diverging behavior. For cost models like time, derived bounds imply termination with probability one. To highlight the novel ideas, the presentation focuses on linear potential and a core language. However, the analysis is implemented as an extension of Resource Aware ML and supports polynomial bounds and user defined data structures. The effectiveness of the technique is evaluated by analyzing the sample complexity of discrete distributions and with a novel average-case estimation for deterministic programs that combines expected cost analysis with statistical methods. 

Automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA) is a type-based technique for inferring concrete (non-asymptotic) bounds on a program's resource usage. Existing work on AARA has focused on bounds that are polynomial in the sizes of the inputs. This paper presents and extension of AARA to exponential bounds that preserves the benefits of the technique, such as compositionality and efficient type inference based on linear constraint solving. A key idea is the use of the Stirling numbers of the second kind as the basis of potential functions, which play the same role as the binomial coefficients in polynomial AARA. To formalize the similarities with the existing analyses, the paper presents a general methodology for AARA that is instantiated to the polynomial version, the exponential version, and a combined system with potential functions that are formed by products of Stirling numbers and binomial coefficients. The soundness of exponential AARA is proved with respect to an operational cost semantics and the analysis of representative example programs demonstrates the effectiveness of the new analysis. 

This paper presents McNetKAT, a scalable tool for verifying probabilistic network programs. McNetKAT is based on a new semantics for the guarded and history-free fragment of Probabilistic NetKAT in terms of finite-state, absorbing Markov chains. This view allows the semantics of all programs to be computed exactly, enabling construction of an automatic verification tool. Domain-specific optimizations and a parallelizing backend enable McNetKAT to analyze networks with thousands of nodes, automatically reasoning about general properties such as probabilistic program equivalence and refinement, as well as networking properties such as resilience to failures. We evaluate McNetKAT's scalability using real-world topologies, compare its performance against state-of-the-art tools, and develop an extended case study on a recently proposed data center network design.