Read the following excerpt from a legal journal examining tort law:
"In the adjudication of torts involving hazardous environmental exposure, courts have increasingly relied on the doctrine of 'probabilistic causation.' Unlike traditional 'but-for' causation, which demands a demonstration that a specific harm would not have occurred absent the defendant's conduct, probabilistic causation does not require absolute deterministic proof. Instead, the term describes a legal framework wherein liability may be established by proving that the defendant's actions significantly elevated the statistical likelihood of the injury occurring within a specific population. Legal theorists caution, however, that this framework does not merely equate to an increased risk; rather, it necessitates that the elevated risk directly materializes as a quantifiable injury pattern among the exposed group."
Based on the explicit distinctions made by the author in the excerpt, complete the definition below.