I want to slightly change the answer given by Wes, because version 0.16.2 requires as_index=False. If you don't set it, you get an empty dataframe.

Source:

Aggregation functions will not return the groups that you are aggregating over if they are named columns, when as_index=True, the default. The grouped columns will be the indices of the returned object.

Passing as_index=False will return the groups that you are aggregating over, if they are named columns.

Aggregating functions are ones that reduce the dimension of the returned objects, for example: mean, sum, size, count, std, var, sem, describe, first, last, nth, min, max. This is what happens when you do for example DataFrame.sum() and get back a Series.

nth can act as a reducer or a filter, see here.

import pandas as pd

df1 = pd.DataFrame({"Name":["Alice", "Bob", "Mallory", "Mallory", "Bob" , "Mallory"],
                    "City":["Seattle","Seattle","Portland","Seattle","Seattle","Portland"]})
print df1
#
#       City     Name
#0   Seattle    Alice
#1   Seattle      Bob
#2  Portland  Mallory
#3   Seattle  Mallory
#4   Seattle      Bob
#5  Portland  Mallory
#
g1 = df1.groupby(["Name", "City"], as_index=False).count()
print g1
#
#                  City  Name
#Name    City
#Alice   Seattle      1     1
#Bob     Seattle      2     2
#Mallory Portland     2     2
#        Seattle      1     1
#

EDIT:

In version 0.17.1 and later you can use subset in count and reset_index with parameter name in size:

print df1.groupby(["Name", "City"], as_index=False ).count()
#IndexError: list index out of range

print df1.groupby(["Name", "City"]).count()
#Empty DataFrame
#Columns: []
#Index: [(Alice, Seattle), (Bob, Seattle), (Mallory, Portland), (Mallory, Seattle)]

print df1.groupby(["Name", "City"])[['Name','City']].count()
#                  Name  City
#Name    City                
#Alice   Seattle      1     1
#Bob     Seattle      2     2
#Mallory Portland     2     2
#        Seattle      1     1

print df1.groupby(["Name", "City"]).size().reset_index(name='count')
#      Name      City  count
#0    Alice   Seattle      1
#1      Bob   Seattle      2
#2  Mallory  Portland      2
#3  Mallory   Seattle      1

The difference between count and size is that size counts NaN values while count does not.

Three methods:

DataFrame: pd.groupby(['column']).size()

Series： sel.groupby(sel).size()

Series to DataFrame:

pd.DataFrame( sel, columns=['column']).groupby(['column']).size()