  We investigate the probabilistic cloning and purification of quantum states.
The performance of these probabilistic operations is quantified by the average
fidelity between the ideal and actual output states. We provide a simple
formula for the maximal achievable average fidelity and we explictly show how
to construct a probabilistic operation that achieves this fidelity. We
illustrate our method on several examples such as the phase covariant cloning
of qubits, cloning of coherent states, and purification of qubits transmitted
via depolarizing channel and amplitude damping channel. Our examples reveal
that the probabilistic cloner may yield higher fidelity than the best
deterministic cloner even when the states that should be cloned are linearly
dependent and are drawn from a continuous set.
