Comparing values of equal-length tuple and list
If I've understood your code correctly, you can do this trivially with zip:

def _is_valid_combination(combination, path):
    """
    Check if the combination is valid for the path

    Keyword arguments:
    combination -- tuple of pattern combination
    path -- list of the actual path
    """
    return all(part == '*' or part == path_ for part, path_ in zip(combination, path))