Objective: To explore the relationship between childhood psychological maltreatment and violent online games with cyberbullying behavior among college students, so as to provide reference for early identification and intervention of cyberbullying in colleges. Methods: Using the stratified cluster random sampling method, a questionnaire survey was conducted among 879 college students at Shandong Medical and Pharmaceutical University in December 2025. The questionnaire battery comprised the Chinese version of the Cyberbullying Inventory for College Students, the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire, the Child Psychological Maltreatment Scale, the Violent Video Game Exposure Scale, and the Idol Worship Scale for College Students. Lasso regression and multivariate Logistic regression were used to identify the factors associated with college students cyberbullying behavior. The random forest algorithm was applied to rank the importance of the characteristic variables of cyberbullying behavior and to construct a prediction model, whose performance was evaluated by the area under curve (AUC) for receiver operating characteristic. Results: The prevalence of cyberbullying behavior among college students was 39.14%. After Lasso screening and multivariate Logistic analysis, only child status ( OR =7.25), single parent family ( OR =4.86), permissive parenting style ( OR = 0.10 ), childhood psychological maltreatment ( OR =9.15), violent online games ( OR =1.15), and idol worship ( OR =1.03) were all associated factors of cyberbullying behavior among college students (all P <0.05). The data were split into a training set ( n =615) and a validation set ( n =264) at a ratio of 7∶3. The constructed random forest model yielded an AUC of 0.933 (95% CI = 0.896 -0.970) in the training set and 0.886 (95% CI =0.823-0.949) in the validation set, indicating that the model had a relatively high predictive performance. Conclusion Childhood psychological maltreatment, violent online games, idol worship, only child status, permissive parenting style and single parent family are the related factors of cyberbullying behavior among college students.