I am using 0.17 version of scipy library on ubuntu 16.04 64-bit system in python v3.5. I am unable to find scipy.sparse.save_npz operation in the library, although it is mentioned in the latest documentation.
On listing the callable methods from scipy.sparse object I am getting the following output:
['SparseEfficiencyWarning',
 'SparseWarning',
 'Tester',
 'bench',
 'block_diag',
 'bmat',
 'bsr_matrix',
 'coo_matrix',
 'cs_graph_components',
 'csc_matrix',
 'csr_matrix',
 'dia_matrix',
 'diags',
 'dok_matrix',
 'eye',
 'find',
 'hstack',
 'identity',
 'issparse',
 'isspmatrix',
 'isspmatrix_bsr',
 'isspmatrix_coo',
 'isspmatrix_csc',
 'isspmatrix_csr',
 'isspmatrix_dia',
 'isspmatrix_dok',
 'isspmatrix_lil',
 'kron',
 'kronsum',
 'lil_matrix',
 'rand',
 'random',
 'spdiags',
 'spmatrix',
 'test',
 'tril',
 'triu',
 'vstack']
The list should have contained save_npz method but it is not there. If the method has been deprecated then please tell me some good alternatives for saving and loading sparse matrices. 
 
    