Compare methods

	GPS Trajectory Analysis	Network Distance Analysis
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2015	1959
Originator	Yu Zheng	Edsger W. Dijkstra (shortest-path foundation)
Type	Pipeline for turning raw movement traces into structured mobility information	Measurement of distance and travel cost along a network rather than straight-line
Seminal source	Zheng, Y. (2015). Trajectory data mining: an overview. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 6(3), 1–41.	Dijkstra, E. W. (1959). A note on two problems in connexion with graphs. Numerische Mathematik, 1(1), 269–271.
Aliases	Trajectory Data Mining, Movement Trajectory Analysis, GPS Trace Analysis, Mobility Trajectory Mining	Shortest-Path Analysis, Network Travel-Cost Analysis, OD Cost Matrix Analysis, Routing Distance Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	GPS trajectory analysis is the pipeline that turns raw streams of timestamped location fixes into structured, meaningful mobility information — the stops where a person dwells, the trips between them, the transport modes used, and the network routes actually travelled. Following the trajectory-data-mining framework synthesized by Yu Zheng in 2015, it cleans noisy positions, segments movement into stays and journeys, snaps points onto road or transit networks, and infers behaviour and recurrent patterns. It is the foundation for activity-space, travel-demand, and mobility studies built on smartphone and vehicle tracking data.	Network distance analysis measures how far apart places are along a real network — roads, paths, rails — rather than as the crow flies, recognizing that movement is constrained to edges and junctions. Its engine is the shortest-path problem solved by Dijkstra's 1959 algorithm, which finds the least-cost route between locations over a weighted graph and scales up to origin–destination cost matrices between many points. Network distance and travel time are the realistic inputs to accessibility, routing, location, and flow analyses, and their ratio to straight-line distance — the detour or circuity index — itself diagnoses how indirect a network is.