What is the "standard reference" for cascade forward neural network? What is the "standard reference" that firstly describes or surveys in details the cascade forward neural network? This kind of net is available in matlab toolbox for long cascadeforwardnet (as early as 1990's), but I can't find the original reference. Please note that it seems NOT the cascade-correlation network.
 A: Please take my answer with a pinch of salt as I am only vaguely familiar with this particular kind of NN architecture:
Scott E. Fahlman and Christian Lebiere.
The Cascade Correlation Learning Architecture. 
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems pages 524–532, 1990.
A: As Ngiann notes, Fahlman and Lebiere (1989) is the original paper. The pdf is widely available on the Internet, including this address.
I wasn't sure from reading your question if you just wanted the original paper that launched CasCor, or the best "go-to" reference, or a list of alternatives. Since Fahlman and Lebiere naturally didn't cover a lot of the variants or experiments with CasCor that came after 1989, I'll list a few good ones I've encountered, all of which are available on the Internet without a paywall. So far, my impression is that there isn't one single dominant paper or book that acts as a sort of CasCor Bible, but there are some that are clearly worth reading.
• The most comprehensive treatment I've seen to date is Balázs, Gabor, "Cascade-Correlation Neural Networks: A Survey," which can be found here. There may be better ones, but I haven't run across them yet.
• Another general reference is Prechelt, Lutz, 1996, "Investigation of the CasCor Family of Learning Algorithms," which is available online. 
• For some empirical testing of cascade correlation, try Yang, Jihoon and Honavar, Vasant, "Experiments with the Cascade-Correlation Algorithm" at this address.
• One noteworthy variant is Fahlman's extension of cascade correlation to RNNs, in Fahlman, Scott E., 1991, "The Recurrent Cascade-Correlation Architecture," which can be found here.
• Another well-written article involves the extension of cascade correlation to RBFs. See Lu, Weiying and Harrington, Peter de B., 2009, "Radial Basis Function Cascade Correlation Networks," pp. 1045-1068 in Algorithms, Vol. 2. I found it at this Google address.
I hope that helps. I've also run into a few decent case studies, but I don't think they'd answer your question. The three articles on variants and experimentation are not general treatments per se, but they do contain good summaries of CasCor nets.
