"A data scientist should be better at statistics than any other software engineer. "
Probability distributions are fundamental to statistics, like data structures are fundamental to computer science. The knowledge of the data distribution helps us to select what type of machine learning model would be a good choice on such a dataset.
This is an attempt to illustrate 5 basic distributions, viz Poisson, Uniform, Bernoulli, Gaussian, and Gamma.
References: https://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2015/12/common-probability-distributions-the-data-scientists-crib-sheet/