dropna(subset=...) does not accept incomplete key

[toobaz]

Code Sample, a copy-pastable example if possible

In [3]: df = pd.DataFrame(index=range(3), columns=pd.MultiIndex.from_product([['I', 'II'], ['a', 'b']]))

In [4]: df.dropna(subset=['I'])
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
KeyError                                  Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-2ec2c1f3958a> in <module>()
----> 1 df.dropna(subset=['I'])

/home/pietro/nobackup/repo/pandas/pandas/core/frame.py in dropna(self, axis, how, thresh, subset, inplace)
   3339                 check = indices == -1
   3340                 if check.any():
-> 3341                     raise KeyError(list(np.compress(check, subset)))
   3342                 agg_obj = self.take(indices, axis=agg_axis)
   3343 

KeyError: ['I']

... which is particularly unexpected when doing:

In [5]: df['other'] = (1, 3, np.nan)

In [6]: df.dropna(subset=['other'])
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
KeyError                                  Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-6-5d8972ce7a1c> in <module>()
----> 1 df.dropna(subset=['other'])

/home/pietro/nobackup/repo/pandas/pandas/core/frame.py in dropna(self, axis, how, thresh, subset, inplace)
   3339                 check = indices == -1
   3340                 if check.any():
-> 3341                     raise KeyError(list(np.compress(check, subset)))
   3342                 agg_obj = self.take(indices, axis=agg_axis)
   3343 

KeyError: ['other']

Problem description

dropna(subset=...) should mimic the behaviour of indexing with incomplete MultiIndex keys.

Expected Output

In [7]: df.dropna(subset=[('other', '')])
Out[7]: 
     I        II      other
     a    b    a    b      
0  NaN  NaN  NaN  NaN   1.0
1  NaN  NaN  NaN  NaN   3.0

Output of pd.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit: None
python: 3.5.3.final.0
python-bits: 64
OS: Linux
OS-release: 4.9.0-3-amd64
machine: x86_64
processor:
byteorder: little
LC_ALL: None
LANG: it_IT.UTF-8
LOCALE: it_IT.UTF-8

pandas: 0.21.0.dev+546.gad7d051bd
pytest: 3.0.6
pip: 9.0.1
setuptools: None
Cython: 0.25.2
numpy: 1.12.1
scipy: 0.19.0
pyarrow: None
xarray: None
IPython: 5.1.0.dev
sphinx: 1.5.6
patsy: 0.4.1
dateutil: 2.6.0
pytz: 2017.2
blosc: None
bottleneck: 1.2.1
tables: 3.3.0
numexpr: 2.6.1
feather: 0.3.1
matplotlib: 2.0.2
openpyxl: None
xlrd: 1.0.0
xlwt: 1.1.2
xlsxwriter: 0.9.6
lxml: None
bs4: 4.5.3
html5lib: 0.999999999
sqlalchemy: 1.0.15
pymysql: None
psycopg2: None
jinja2: 2.9.6
s3fs: None
fastparquet: None
pandas_gbq: None
pandas_datareader: 0.2.1

[ashishthapa14]

can somebody explain to me, why dropna subset method doesn't work with columns?