Three-dimensional Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) data of methane-air MILD combustion is analysed to study the behaviour of MILD reaction zones and to identify a suitable modelling paradigm for MILD combustion. The combustion kinetics in the DNS was modelled using a skeletal mechanism including non-unity Lewis number effects. The reaction zones under MILD conditions are highly convoluted and contorted resulting in their frequent interactions. This leads to combustion occurring over a large portion of the computational volume and giving an appearance of distributed combustion. Three paradigms, standard flamelets, mild flame elements (MIFEs) and PSR, along with a presumed PDF model are explored to estimate the mean and filtered reaction rate in MILD combustion. A beta function is used to estimate the presumed PDF shape. The variations of species mass fractions and reaction rate with temperature computed using thesemodels are compared to the DNS results. The PSR-based model is found to be appropriate, since the conditional averages obtained from the DNS agree well with those obtained using the PSR model. The flamelets model with MIFEs gives only a qualitative agreement because it does not include the effects of reaction zone interactions.