Pandas sum by groupby, but exclude certain columns

Question

What is the best way to do a groupby on a Pandas dataframe, but exclude some columns from that groupby? e.g. I have the following dataframe:

Answer 1

You can select the columns of a groupby:

In [11]: df.groupby(['Country', 'Item_Code'])[["Y1961", "Y1962", "Y1963"]].sum()
Out[11]:
                       Y1961  Y1962  Y1963
Country     Item_Code
Afghanistan 15            10     20     30
            25            10     20     30
Angola      15            30     40     50
            25            30     40     50

Note that the list passed must be a subset of the columns otherwise you'll see a KeyError.