Compare methods

	GPS Trajectory Analysis	Time Geography Analysis
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2015	1970
Originator	Yu Zheng	Torsten Hägerstrand
Type	Pipeline for turning raw movement traces into structured mobility information	Framework for representing individual movement and constraints in space and time
Seminal source	Zheng, Y. (2015). Trajectory data mining: an overview. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 6(3), 1–41.	Hägerstrand, T. (1970). What about people in regional science? Papers of the Regional Science Association, 24(1), 6–21.
Aliases	Trajectory Data Mining, Movement Trajectory Analysis, GPS Trace Analysis, Mobility Trajectory Mining	Hägerstrand Time Geography, Space-Time Path Analysis, Space-Time Prism Analysis, Time-Space Geography
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.	Time geography is a framework, introduced by Torsten Hägerstrand in 1970, that represents human activity as continuous trajectories through a joint space-time coordinate system rather than as static points on a map. Each individual traces a space-time path through the 'space-time aquarium', and the set of all locations that can be reached and returned from within a time budget forms a space-time prism, whose spatial footprint is the potential path area. The framework grounds accessibility and mobility in the inescapable fact that people can be in only one place at a time and that movement consumes both space and time.