The importance of cellular networks continuously increases as we assume ubiquitous connectivity in our daily lives. As a result, the underlying core telecom systems have very high reliability and availability requirements, that are sometimes hard to meet. This study presents a proactive approach that could aid satisfying these high requirements on reliability and availability by predicting future base station alarms. A data set containing 231 internal performance measures from cellular (4G) base stations is correlated with a data set containing base station alarms. Next, two experiments are used to investigate (i) the alarm prediction performance of six machine learning models, and (ii) how different predict-ahead times (ranging from 10 min to 48 hours) affect the predictive performance. A 10-fold cross validation evaluation approach and statistical analysis suggested that the Random Forest models showed best performance. Further, the results indicate the feasibility of predicting severe alarms one hour in advance with a precision of 0.812 (±0.022, 95 % CI), recall of 0.619 (±0.027) and F1-score of 0.702 (±0.022). A model interpretation package, ELI5, was used to identify the most influential features in order to gain model insight. Overall, the results are promising and indicate the potential of an early-warning system that enables a proactive means for achieving high reliability and availability requirements. IEEE