The type of power fiber optic cable fault event obtained by analyzing the optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) detection curve is an important basis for ensuring the operation quality of communication lines. To address the issue of low accuracy in recognizing fault event patterns, this research proposes the AVOA-LightGBM method for optical cable fault event pattern recognition based on wavelet packet decomposition. Initially, a three-layer wavelet packet decomposition is performed on different fault events, resulting in eight characteristic signals. These signals are then normalized and used as input for each recognition model. The Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) is optimized using the African vulture optimization algorithm (AVOA) for pattern recognition. The experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves a recognition accuracy of 98.24%. It outperforms LightGBM, support vector machine (SVM), and extreme learning machine (ELM) by 3.7%, 19.15%, and 5.67%, respectively, in terms of accuracy. Moreover, it shows a 1.8% improvement compared with the combined model PSO-LightGBM.