Finding sequence combinations that impact target variable the most
With machine learning, I could think that process analytics is what you are looking for:

I imagine you may have a dataset like this:

[step1, step2, step3]  -&gt; [No Target]
[step1, step2]         -&gt; [Target]
...


Business Process Analytics is the family of methods and tools that can be applied to these event streams in order to support decision-making in organizations. The analysis of process events can focus on the behavior of completed processes, evaluate currently running process instances, or focus on predicting the behavior of process instances in the future. Process Analytics

Is the most similar process (to your question) in Analytics I know