Remove duplicates from dataframe, based on two columns A,B, keeping row with max value in another column C

You can do it using group by:

c_maxes = df.groupby(['A', 'B']).C.transform(max)
df = df.loc[df.C == c_maxes]

c_maxes is a Series of the maximum values of C in each group but which is of the same length and with the same index as df. If you haven’t used .transform then printing c_maxes might be a good idea to see how it works.

Another approach using drop_duplicates would be

df.sort('C').drop_duplicates(subset=['A', 'B'], take_last=True)

Not sure which is more efficient but I guess the first approach as it doesn’t involve sorting.

EDIT:
From pandas 0.18 up the second solution would be

df.sort_values('C').drop_duplicates(subset=['A', 'B'], keep='last')

or, alternatively,

df.sort_values('C', ascending=False).drop_duplicates(subset=['A', 'B'])

In any case, the groupby solution seems to be significantly more performing:

%timeit -n 10 df.loc[df.groupby(['A', 'B']).C.max == df.C]
10 loops, best of 3: 25.7 ms per loop

%timeit -n 10 df.sort_values('C').drop_duplicates(subset=['A', 'B'], keep='last')
10 loops, best of 3: 101 ms per loop