Suppose you have declared n registers in your circuit, but at the end you want to measure only m qubits. Here the same is done using an example, where out of 4 registers, you need to measure only 2 qubits.

from qiskit import QuantumRegister, ClassicalRegister, QuantumCircuit, execute, Aer

q = QuantumRegister(4)
# we need only 2 classical bits as we are measuring only 2 qubits
c = ClassicalRegister(2)
qc = QuantumCircuit(q,c)

# affecting the 2 qubits, that I am planning to measure
qc.h(q[0])
qc.x(q[3])

# Measuring the first and last qubit only
qc.measure([0,3],[1,0])
job = execute(qc,Aer.get_backend('qasm_simulator'),shots=1000)
counts = job.result().get_counts(qc)
print(counts)

The above code results in

{'01': 503, '11': 497}

In short, you need to provide the array of Qubits’ indices that you want to measure in the first parameter of qc.measure. And also, don’t make the mistake of declaring more classical registers than required.

Why [1,0] as second parameter instead of simply putting c ?

In classical bits, counting starts from the right. If there are 2 bits, say 10 , then 0 is the 0th bit and 1 is the 1st bit. Now if we provide simply c as the second parameter in qc.measure, by default q[0] is mapped to the least significant bit - 0th bit(the right most bit). And that would result in output as {'10': 503, '11': 497} because the right most bit(q[0]) gives 0 and 1 with nearly equal probability.

This leads to confusion because we passed [0,3] in the first parameter and while reading the output we expect the outcome of q[0] to be on the left most side rather than the right most side. To avoid this confusion, we map the outcome of q[0] to the most significant bit, which is the right most classical bit - 1st bit in this case.

NOTE: Alternatively you could pass [3,0] as first parameter and c as second parameter in qc.measure, but I didn’t like the idea of disturbing the order of qubits.

Credits:

It was really frustrating for me, when I couldn’t find how to do this on the google. Thanks to Jack Woehr for helping me out with this thing in Qiskit slack.