Understanding the distribution of people's transportation mode is a crucial facet of today's urban mobility for proper transportation planning. The penetration of smart-phones combined with their sensing capability is an enabler for crowdsourcing large mobility data such as commuters' GPS records. In this paper, we leverage the G PS traces of commuters to infer five different transportation modes frequently used in urban areas including foot, bike, bus, car and metro. We compare three different approaches commonly reported in the literature for transportation mode detection from the family of machine learning algorithms (random forest -RF) and deep learning architectures (convolutional neural network -CNN and ensemble of autoencoders -EAE). By splitting the dataset into train-test by the period of data collection, as well as the conventional 80–20 split, we evaluate the impact of several data pre-processing decisions on overall classifiers' performance. Our results show RF and CNN performing better upon evaluation on classification metrics such as the f1 score and the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve.