Pandas unstack but only create multi index for certain columns - python-2.7

Question

I have a data frame that is production data for a factory. The factory is organised into lines. The structure of the data is such that one of the columns contains repeating values that properly thought of are headers. I need to reshape the data. So in the following DataFrame the 'Quality' column contains 4 measures, that are then measured for each hour. Clearly this gives us four observations per line.
The goal here is to transpose this data, but such that some of the columns are single index and some are multi index. The row index should remain ['Date', 'ID']. The single index columns should be 'line_no', 'floor', 'buyer' and the multi index columns should be the hourly measures for each of the quality measures.
I know that this is possible because I accidentally stumbled across the way to do it. Basically as my code will show, I put everything in the index except the hourly data and then unstacked the quality column from the index. Then by chance, I tried to reset the index and it created this amazing dataframe where some columns were single index and some multi. Of course its highly impractical to have loads of columns in the index, because we might want to do stuff with them, like change them. My question is how to achieve this type of thing without having to go through this (what I feel is a) workaraound.
import random
import pandas as pd
d = {'ID' : [1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3] * 2,
'Date' : ['2013-05-04' for x in xrange(12)] + \
['2013-05-06' for x in xrange(12)],
'line_no' : [1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3] * 2,
'floor' : [5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, 5] * 2,
'buyer' : ['buyer1', 'buyer1', 'buyer1', 'buyer1',\
'buyer2', 'buyer2', 'buyer2', 'buyer2',\
'buyer1', 'buyer1', 'buyer1', 'buyer1'] * 2,
'Quality' : ['no_checked', 'good', 'alter', 'rejected'] * 6,
'Hour1' : [random.randint(1000, 15000) for x in xrange(24)],
'Hour2' : [random.randint(1000, 15000) for x in xrange(24)],
'Hour3' : [random.randint(1000, 15000) for x in xrange(24)],
'Hour4' : [random.randint(1000, 15000) for x in xrange(24)],
'Hour5' : [random.randint(1000, 15000) for x in xrange(24)],
'Hour6' : [random.randint(1000, 15000) for x in xrange(24)]}
DF = pd.DataFrame(d, columns = ['ID', 'Date', 'line_no', 'floor', 'buyer',
'Quality', 'Hour1', 'Hour2', 'Hour3', 'Hour4',
'Hour5', 'Hour6'])
DF.set_index(['Date', 'ID'])
So this is how I achieved what I wanted, but there must be a way to do this without having to go through all these steps. Help please...
# Reset the index
DF.reset_index(inplace = True)
# Put everything in the index
DF.set_index(['Date', 'ID', 'line_no', 'floor', 'buyer', 'Quality'], inplace = True)
# Unstack Quality
DFS = DF.unstack('Quality')
#Now this was the accidental workaround - gives exactly the result I want
DFS.reset_index(inplace = True)
DFS.set_index(['Date', 'ID'], inplace = True)
All help appreciated. Sorry for the long question, but at least there is some data riiiight!

Answer 1

In general inplace operations are not faster and IMHO less readable.
In [18]: df.set_index(['Date','ID','Quality']).unstack('Quality'))
Out[18]:
line_no floor buyer Hour1 Hour2 Hour3 Hour4 Hour5 Hour6
Quality alter good no_checked rejected alter good no_checked rejected alter good no_checked rejected alter good no_checked rejected alter good no_checked rejected alter good no_checked rejected
Date ID
2013-05-04 1 1 5 buyer1 6920 8681 9317 14631 5739 2112 4211 12026 13577 1855 13884 12710 7250 2540 1948 7116 9874 7302 10961 8251 3070 2793 14293 10895
2 2 6 buyer2 7943 7501 13725 1648 7178 9670 6278 6888 9969 11766 9968 4722 7242 4049 6704 2225 6546 8688 11513 14550 2140 11941 1142 6683
3 3 5 buyer1 5155 2449 13648 2183 14184 7309 1185 10454 11742 14102 2242 14297 6185 5554 12505 13312 3062 7426 4421 5693 12342 11622 10431 13375
2013-05-06 1 1 5 buyer1 14563 1343 14419 3350 8526 1185 5244 14777 2238 3640 6717 1109 7777 13136 1732 8681 14454 1059 10606 6942 9349 4524 13931 11799
2 2 6 buyer2 14837 9524 8453 6074 11516 12356 9651 10650 15000 11374 4690 10914 1857 3231 14627 6590 6503 9268 13108 8581 8448 12013 14175 10783
3 3 5 buyer1 9032 12959 4613 6793 7918 2827 6027 13002 11771 13370 12767 11080 12624 13269 11740 10543 8609 14709 11921 12484 8670 12706 8001 8991
[6 rows x 27 columns]
is a quite reasonable idiom for what you are doing