You can use the following syntax to group rows in a pandas DataFrame and then sort the values within groups:

df.sort_values(['var1','var2'],ascending=False).groupby('var1').head()

The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.

Example: Use GroupBy & Sort Within Groups in Pandas

Suppose we have the following pandas DataFrame that shows the sales made at two different store locations:

import pandas as pd

#create DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'store': ['B', 'B', 'A', 'A', 'B', 'B', 'A', 'A'],
                   'sales': [12, 25, 8, 14, 10, 20, 30, 30]})

#view DataFrame
print(df)

  store  sales
0     B     12
1     B     25
2     A      8
3     A     14
4     B     10
5     B     20
6     A     30
7     A     30

We can use the following syntax to group the rows by the store column and sort in descending order based on the sales column:

#group by store and sort by sales values in descending order
df.sort_values(['store','sales'],ascending=False).groupby('store').head()

	store	sales
1	B	25
5	B	20
0	B	12
4	B	10
6	A	30
7	A	30
3	A	14
2	A	8

Note that we could also drop the ascending=False argument to sort the sales values in ascending order:

#group by store and sort by sales values in ascending order
df.sort_values(['store','sales']).groupby('store').head()

	store	sales
2	A	8
3	A	14
6	A	30
7	A	30
4	B	10
0	B	12
5	B	20
1	B	25

Note that the head() function only displays the first 5 values by group.

To display the top n values by group, simply use head(n) instead.

Note: You can find the complete documentation for the GroupBy operation in pandas .

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in pandas: