Answer by ev-br for Accessing elements in coo_matrix

From the docs for coo_matrix:

 |  Intended Usage
 |      - COO is a fast format for constructing sparse matrices
 |      - Once a matrix has been constructed, convert to CSR or
 |        CSC format for fast arithmetic and matrix vector operations
 |      - By default when converting to CSR or CSC format, duplicate (i,j)
 |        entries will be summed together.  This facilitates efficient
 |        construction of finite element matrices and the like. (see example)

And indeed, csr_matrix supports the indexing in an expected way:

>>> from scipy.sparse import coo_matrix
>>> m = coo_matrix([[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]])
>>> m1 = m.tocsr()
>>> m1[1, 2]
6
>>> m1
<2x3 sparse matrix of type '<type 'numpy.int64'>'
    with 6 stored elements in Compressed Sparse Row format>

(The way I found the above quote from the docs was >>> help(m) which is equivalent to the online docs).