I AGREE with what F.S. Malhi of Ipoh says about calculating mean household incomes (”Flawed system?” - NST, Dec 20).

It was provided earlier that the average monthly household income of Indian families was RM3,456 as compared with the national average of RM3,022.

The primary concern is whether the right methodology was used for the analysis.

Essentially, in statistical methodology, statisticians prefer to use the “mean” to represent the full picture.

Nonetheless, with regards to wealth distribution, extreme values need to be removed.

In statistics, this is known as “outliers”. By removing this, the data will be more accurate and reliable. Hence the data as regards to the average monthly household income of Indian families cannot be generalised with the population of Indians in Malaysia.

We need a better methodology to study the distribution of income to represent all the races in Malaysia.

Source: NST – December 24, 2007