I'd like to do a regression analysis of magnetic susceptibility measurements taken at several sample points to a nearby road. The purpose is to see if proximity to the road correlates with higher magnetic susceptibility. For this to work I need to know how far each point is from the road. I've added a vector line over the road to provide something to measure against. Can anyone recommend how I should proceed from here. Ideally I'd like something that will measure all of the points en mass as it would be tedious to measure each one individually. I tried the distance matrix but it can only measure the relationship between points, not between points and a line.
1 Answer
Your measurements are a point layer, if I understood correctly. Create a new attribute on this layer with Field Calculator with this expression and replace line_layer with the name of the line layer. The expression looks for each point which is the nearest line on the layer line_layer, then identifies the cosest point on this line and returns the length measurement to the current point:
distance(
$geometry,
closest_point(
overlay_nearest ('Output least cost path',$geometry)[0],
$geometry
)
)
