Count unique values using pandas groupby

I think you can use SeriesGroupBy.nunique:

print (df.groupby('param')['group'].nunique())
param
a    2
b    1
Name: group, dtype: int64

Another solution with unique, then create new df by DataFrame.from_records, reshape to Series by stack and last value_counts:

a = df[df.param.notnull()].groupby('group')['param'].unique()
print (pd.DataFrame.from_records(a.values.tolist()).stack().value_counts())
a    2
b    1
dtype: int64

This is just an add-on to the solution in case you want to compute not only unique values but other aggregate functions:

df.groupby(['group']).agg(['min', 'max', 'count', 'nunique'])