How to compare contingency tables for a specific pattern?

I have a a series of contingency tables, like:

    A   B
|----|----|
C | 0  | 10 |
D | 17 | 2  |


and I need a numerical value to select and order those tables where:

• (C,A) tends to 0, is much smaller than (C,B)
• (D,B) tends to 0, is much smaller than (D,A)
• (C,B) and (D,A) are > 0, the bigger the better

It doesn't matter if the total of the first row is bigger than the total of the second row.

Example: this table

    A   B
|----|----|
C | 12 | 41 |
D | 72 | 0  |


is good, and this table

    A   B
|-----|-----|
C | 178 | 100 |
D | 266 |   1 |


is still OK-ish, but should be ranked lower than the other one. The first row is clearly bad, but the second row makes up for it.

EDIT:

After John's answer, I've plotted the data ordered by three "measures of fit", to compare my two measures against John's.

1. Inverse of Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC): a "perfect table" as defined above would produce an MCC of -1, while switching columns would provide "1". So doing -MCC and filtering out all values < 0 gives a good filtering/sorting index, and scales nicely between [0, 1].
2. Error Rate Difference: proportion of (C,B) on the first row minus proportion of (D,B) on the second row. A value of 1 means that (C,A) and (D,B) are equal to 0. Scales nicely between [0, 1].
3. John's fitting expression: doesn't fit into [0, 1], but models the constraints literally.

Here are the plots:

• This looks like two questions so it's broader than is usually desired here (moreso than you realize). Edit this so that it's just about how to solve your fitting problem. If, after you get an answer you still want to ask about p-values as measures of fit then do that after. And also edit the problem because there's lots of superfluous information that's in some ways a little misleading. All you need is the contingency table and the statement A >> B is good but it must have z >> 0. That would satisfy the whole thing I think. Could x be small? Anyway, be clearer on what you need to fit. – John Jul 10 '15 at 14:40
• I've tried to shorten it as much as I can. Thanks for the tip. – Fabio Jul 14 '15 at 13:13
• I thought before you also said that A should be larger than B. – John Jul 14 '15 at 22:34
• In the original answer I spoke of both "good tables" and "bad tables", and differentiated the cases. This got a bit confusing. The ones respecting the property A >> B are "perfectly good" tables - but I'm not looking for those. In the above, there is no ambiguity: those tables are the ones I need to identify and order by "extremeness", following the pattern I specified. I hope it's clearer. Thanks. – Fabio Jul 15 '15 at 15:00
• Your original two measures don't take into account your third condition (two cells greater than 0). As far as I can see they only take into account the proportion on a row which would cover the first two conditions. My formula includes the third condition. You need to decide on the importance of that. And further, artificially constraining your measurements between 0 and 1 is almost never a good idea. Have you really thought about why you're doing that? – John Jul 16 '15 at 15:19

Your original suggestion to use p-values was problematic in a number of ways. The biggest one is probably that they're dependent upon N such that a table with a small number of values but very well fit what you desire would have a higher p-value than one that had more values but didn't fit nearly so well.

How about just using the requirements you set out as the measure? The function below just turns your list of requirements into a simple equation. The numerator can be larger than the denominator but only when the requirements are strongly met. I don't think this is going to be too dependent on N but you should try and see what it looks like. Check the distribution of values and see if it's reasonable.

You might also note that I flattened your matrices. The indexes I used will match the matrices and this will function with a matrix or a vector. So if you already have all of the tables as matrices this would work just fine.

good <- c(12, 72, 41, 0)
ok <- c(178, 266, 100, 1)
bad <- c(178, 26, 100, 40)

myStat <- function(y){
( (y[3] - y[1]) +  (y[2] - y[4]) + y[2] + y[3] ) / sum(y)
}

myStat(ok)
myStat(good)