Groupby with User Defined Functions Pandas

To group by a > 1, you can define your function like:

>>> def GroupColFunc(df, ind, col):
...     if df[col].loc[ind] > 1:
...         return 'Group1'
...     else:
...         return 'Group2'
... 

An then call it like

>>> people.groupby(lambda x: GroupColFunc(people, x, 'a')).sum()
               a         b         c         d        e
Group2 -2.384614 -0.762208  3.359299 -1.574938 -2.65963

Or you can do it only with anonymous function:

>>> people.groupby(lambda x: 'Group1' if people['b'].loc[x] > people['a'].loc[x] else 'Group2').sum()
               a         b         c         d         e
Group1 -3.280319 -0.007196  1.525356  0.324154 -1.002439
Group2  0.895705 -0.755012  1.833943 -1.899092 -1.657191

As said in documentation, you can also group by passing Series providing a label -> group name mapping:

>>> mapping = np.where(people['b'] > people['a'], 'Group1', 'Group2')
>>> mapping
Joe       Group2
Steve     Group1
Wes       Group2
Jim       Group1
Travis    Group1
dtype: string48
>>> people.groupby(mapping).sum()
               a         b         c         d         e
Group1 -3.280319 -0.007196  1.525356  0.324154 -1.002439
Group2  0.895705 -0.755012  1.833943 -1.899092 -1.657191